Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

The lights are all blinking red.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

In after Baud. Damn.

Books are my comfort food!

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

It’s the corruption, stupid.

We still have time to mess this up!

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

T R E 4 5 O N

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Wooden Spoons

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Wooden Spoons

I’ve had this wooden spoon forever. Probably almost 30 years. It was one of my dad’s wooden spoons that I inherited (or maybe stole) when I got out of the army and was setting up a cooking set for my apartment in college. I have a bunch of other wooden spoons that I have accumulated over the years. I have them made from all types of wood. I special ordered a 24 inch wooden spoon from PRAGUE that was handcrafted and airmailed to me so I would have something to stir large pots without singeing my knuckles. I have one of those cajun paddles. I have a couple metal spoons, and some made of materials that I am not even sure what they are (silicon and rubber? who knows).

But when I go to cook- that is the spoon I reach for first. If it is dirty, I will briefly contemplate using another one, but I always break down, wash it, and use it. What can I say, I’m a dance with the girl who brung you kind of guy. I wouldn’t say I don’t like cooking with other spoons, but that I don’t enjoy it as much as I do with that spoon. It’s never let me down.

I was thinking about this this morning while I was cooking. I wanted to start the day early and get the soup going so it could cook down over low heat. It’s my take on a tuscan bean soup- cannelloni beans, bacon, shallots, carrots, celery, a parm cheese rind, a can of diced tomatoes, thinly sized zucchini and squash, heavy cream, etc. I’ll show pictures later. I went to go stir things, and I could not find my spoon and it briefly flustered me. I found it in the drying rack behind a plate. Not sure why I put it there instead of where the utensils go, but I found it so that is all that matters.

I was reading the NY Times this morning. I know, they are awful, but I still read them. I like to know what is going on and you can’t hide yourself from things. I came across this story with this image:

Wooden Spoons 1

That’s from the outskirts of Kharkiv, one of the many cities that have just been utterly devastated. The human and physical toll of this brutal and genocidal Russian invasion are just impossible for me to comprehend. The millions who have been uprooted, the thousands killed and the many more thousands wounded and the psychological scars for everyone involved is just mind boggling. It’s a scale of human carnage that is hard to fathom. It’s not unprecedented by any means. The same has been happening in the Middle East for decades, often at our hands with excuses and justifications as bad- there’s not much difference between “They hate us for our freedoms and Iraq has WMD” and “We’re denazifying Ukraine,” to be honest, but there is a distinction in the intentional murder of civilians and intended genocidal behavior.

I thought about that picture while cooking, and the dead and the destroyed villages. The missing children, the murdered loved ones, the decimated villages and towns; people returning to their homes looking to piece their lives back together and find their wooden spoon.

Reader Interactions

73Comments

  1. 1.

    SiubhanDuinne

    people returning to their homes looking to piece their lives back together and find their wooden spoon.

    Well, I have to say when I started reading this post I didn’t expect to burst into tears at the last sentence.

  4. 4.

    Betty

    Yep, the little things that mean home. You get that feeling too if you visit your parents’ home after they have passed. My Mom’ s pie pans. My Dad’s golf ball collection.

  5. 5.

    Geo Wilcox

    Now those bastards are shooting timed landmines all over the Ukraine. They are cluster mines. When they impact they send dozens of landmines to scatter over the area.

     

    From the Seattle Times article:

    BEZRUKY, Ukraine — When Sergiy, a 47-year-old construction worker, got out of bed Sunday morning in this small town in northeastern Ukraine, he discovered a chilling new hazard in a war filled with them: He had woken up in a minefield.

    He had heard a rocket land near his home around 1 in the morning but thought little of it. There had been plenty of rockets since Russian forces invaded in late February. The thuds, crumps and blasts had become a cruel but familiar soundtrack to those who stayed behind, along with the acidic smell the weapons left in the air.

    But what landed in his yard was a new weapon for the town’s residents to add to their growing lexicon of destruction: They knew the Smerch, the Grad, the Hurricane — and now they were introduced to the PTM-1S land mine, a type of scatterable munition.

    “Nobody understood what it was,” said Sergiy, declining to provide his surname out of fear of retribution. The weapons roar in like any rocket, but instead of exploding instantly, they eject up to two dozen mines that explode at intervals, parceling out death in the hours afterward.

  7. 7.

    Queen of Lurkers

    That is a gem of an essay.

    I teach English at a university (all kinds of courses) and we often have to assign a personal experience essay to students. We should ban assigning these essays to 18 year olds. Most of them have no capacity for emotional depth, for looking at their lives in the context of others’ lives. The fact that they don’t read (I feel a rant coming on) doesn’t help. Much of the time, they write drivel.

    This, on the other hand, does an amazing job of pivoting from the personal to the topical/universal and back again.

  8. 8.

    TomMattison

    If you (Cole) had been ordered to participate in a thrust into East Germany, and ordered to shell coordinates that you couldn’t verify as a combatant target, what would you have done ?

    Not a gotcha question, and current you may be different from deployed you. But you have been there and back again.

    Just food for contemplation…,

  11. 11.

    Kropacetic

    @Mathguy: The engineer that came up with that design should be considered a war criminal. The only use is as a weapon of terror.

    Reminds me of a weapon used, tragically, the end of Mockingjay (Hunger Games 3rd volume).

  12. 12.

    debbie

    @debbie:

    This thread explains the design:

    It’s actually done on purpose.

    That building is in Santiago, Chile and was designed by French architect Renauld Le’Gdaye. It was commissioned by the city government. However, their terms stipulated that money to the architect would be made in payments as the project progressed-
    — Ritk Mota (@themotaguy) April 9, 2022

    TLDR: Don’t run out of money to pay the architect. //

  13. 13.

    Dangerman

    @Betty: Interesting choices. When I cleaned out my Parents place, I grabbed all sorts of stuff. The pie spatula was one of the first things grabbed. My Father didn’t golf but I grabbed all his tie clasps (and I can’t recall the last time I wore a tie; at least I do have a thing for pie).

    Ukraine is so depressing. It’s the assholes that truly deserve their fate like Putin and Trump that saddens me. Criminals that need their day in court and then their days in jail (or face a firing squad).

  14. 14.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @TomMattison: Cole was a tanker.  Tanks do direct fire.  That is, they shoot at what they can see.  Artillery is the arm that does indirect fire, shooting at targets it cannot see.  Even then, the observers who are calling the fire mission can see their target, so they should have some responsibility for the missions they call.  The fire direction centers that calculate the firing data are usually told what the target is (troops in the open, armor under cover, POL dump, etc.) so that they can specify an appropriate shell fuse combination.  If they are told that the mission is a children’s hospital, they are responsible for sending that mission to the guns.  At the gun, however, they get the inclination and deflection for the tube, the shell/fuse combo, the amount of propellant, and the number of volleys to be fired.  They have to trust that they are not being asked to shell anything illegal.

  15. 15.

    Ksmiami

    @Omnes Omnibus: Putin’s whole mission is a war crime. At this point, any soldier participating in it is culpable. Russia the nation state cannot be allowed to exist in its present form.

  16. 16.

    Kelly

    I have my father’s Leatherman multi tool in my day pack. He could fix just about anything with whatever was around. One of my most hilarious memories of him was dropping my parents of at PDX. As we walked up to the metal detector a supervisor was training a new guy. The supervisor saw Dad walking up and proceeded to call ALL the tools and other metal stuff in my Dad’s pockets that he pulled out and put on the tray. Dad and supervisor had a great time. Supervisor’s best line was “Why the tape measure? It won’t reach the ground.” This was before 9/11 when small pocket knives were legal.

  19. 19.

    karensky

    What a moving post, Cole.  Wooden spoons are something that we all share and love!

  21. 21.

    Raven

    @Mathguy:

    During the Vietnam War, the US used cluster bombs in air strikes against targets in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.[11] According to The Guardian, of the 260 million cluster bomblets that rained down on Laos between 1964 and 1973, particularly on Xieng Khouang province, 80 million failed to explode.[12] The GlobalPost reports that as of 2009 about 7,000 people have been injured or killed by explosives left from the Vietnam War era in the Vietnamese Quang Tri Province alone.[13]

  26. 26.

    geg6

    That last sentence gutted me, Cole.  I’ll be using my own trusty wooden spoon shortly and it will ring in my ears.

  27. 27.

    Miki

    I just finished Anthony Doerr’s The Light We Cannot See. It was an excruciatingly painful read given the current and ongoing devastation, terror, and brutality in Ukraine.

    Highly recommend the book. Expect tears.

  28. 28.

    WhatsMyNym

    @debbie:

    This building looks like it was designed in Microsoft Word

    I like it!
    Breaks up an otherwise extremely boring side of a cookie cutter building.

  30. 30.

    Gbbalto0

    @Mathguy: It would be an acceptable weapon to drop on an enemy airfield. I agree that it is a war crime to drop on a residential neighborhood.

  36. 36.

    FlyingToaster

    @debbie: I live next to Boston, the city of ugly-ass architecture.  One Western Ave, part of the Harvard Business School, is the same type of building.

  38. 38.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Raven:

    A California woman became an instant millionaire thanks to “some rude person.” 

    Thanks a million, jerk!

  39. 39.

    susanna

    @Miki: Terrific book and one where the images formed from Doerr’s writing and my reactive, unfiltered emotions when reading them are similar to these times in Ukraine.  “Will we ever learn?”….

    As a young adult during the Vietnam War, I well remember the photos of human, other beings, landscape and structural damage that left a slacked jaw too many times.  Then, try eating the comfort food in the home and tucking in for sweet dreams.

    Was it after or during that war when they ceased revealing many if not all “upsetting” active war scenes?.

  40. 40.

    Geminid

    It’s now about midnight in France. Polling for the first round of their Presidential election begins at 6am Sunday. The top two finishers will compete in a runoff on April 24.

    France24 has good coverage. Today’s article reviewed tomorrow’s field. There was an interesting observation, that two formerly powerful parties, Mitterand’s Socialists and Chirac’s Republican Front, are now marginalized. Also, if President Macron wins reelection he will be the first French President to do so since Chirac in 2002.

    The French do politics differently. Political activity was prohibited after midnight last night. Also, fresh polls cannot be published.

  43. 43.

    Wetzel

    You can’t assimilate what you don’t understand in Piaget. You can’t accommodate what is inhuman without losing your humanity. This is a grievous psychic injury intended as a weapon.

    More and more I believe the primary aim of the Ukraine War is to set the stage for a purge in Russia. You can see it starting in the Times today. It might be all my theorizing is some way to find psychic refuge. For me it helps to see there is intentionality in the totalitarian state in Russia trying to reconstitute itself.

    I’m putting away all excuses and contacting old friends. Trying to find myself. I wish I had an old spoon like that!

    It also helps to understand the neuroendocrine response to emotional and physical pain are the same. It seems like the systems have a common origin with the former evolving from the latter. Many Americans are going to accommodate by hollowing out even more. Nothing matters. We will let Putin purge Russia even if we have to do it ourselves.

    Beautiful essay. Good job.

  46. 46.

    Kelly

    In the months after the 2020 Beachie Fire folks sifting through the ashes of their homes, searching for mementoes, was heartbreaking. 470 homes burned. My brother’s home burned. Mom had sorted though our childhood pictures and given the ones we were in to each of us years ago. All gone. They had done the same for their son so at least they had those to copy. The piano we all took lessons on as children. He had my Dad’s guns including our grandpa’s deer rifle, a now rare .25 Remington pump. A gun safe is only fire proof for a little while. Won’t hold up when the fire department can’t get there.

  47. 47.

    BigJimSlade

    @FlyingToaster: The Brutalist look doesn’t do it for you, eh? lol. Regardless, I love walking around Boston and Cambridge :-)
    (I used to live in the area, but not anymore.)

  48. 48.

    BigJimSlade

    @FlyingToaster: Besides City Hall, I honestly never thought of it as a city of bad architecture. I love Copley Square with the church and Hancock tower right next to it.

  49. 49.

    OzarkHillbilly

    I too have a wooden spoon I am attached to. And a smoothing plane. And a spade. And a trowel. And a framing hammer. And a digging bar. And a scraper. And a….

    Tools complete a person. Take them away and it’s like we are missing a limb.

  50. 50.

    karen marie

    @OzarkHillbilly:  I had a spatula that I’d been using since 1995.  It worked perfectly.  And then it broke.  It was smooth, with holes, and I could flip eggs easily.  In the months since, I’ve bought and tossed aside three new spatulas.  None of them easily flip eggs.  They’re all textured.  I despair of ever finding one that works as well.  I’m starting to get the sense that the people who design and manufacture spatulas don’t cook.

  52. 52.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @karen marie: Oh dawg, I have had the exact same experience. Took me years (3 iirc) to find a spat I enjoyed using as much, but I finally did.

  53. 53.

    lowtechcyclist

    @karen marie: Sounds like it’s time to bop on down to Spatula City!

    I’ve had no trouble finding smooth spatulas with holes, in the flipping-eggs/pancakes/burgers size, at WallyWorld.  Maybe the stores that sell primarily kitchen and bath stuff feel they have to be fancier.

  54. 54.

    Mathguy

    @Mart: I know the US is just as guilty of this kind of terrorism. I feel the same way about anyone that designs these, no matter what country they’re from.

  55. 55.

    BigJimSlade

    @karen marie: ? I heard about that happening when the building was new (ish?), but that was before my time there (92 – 09). I heard they wanted to sue, but whoever was responsible was insured by… John Hancock.

  56. 56.

    NotMax

    @karen marie:

    YMMV but have found it a best practice to ignore anything from OXO when it comes to kitchen tools.

    Overpriced and underperforming.

  57. 57.

    Brachiator

    I thought about that picture while cooking, and the dead and the destroyed villages. The missing children, the murdered loved ones, the decimated villages and towns; people returning to their homes looking to piece their lives back together and find their wooden spoon.

    Coming late to the thread.

    Wooden spoons. A sad and lovely metaphor.

    Reminds me a bit of the final paragraph of the James Joyce short story, “The Dead.”

    A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

  58. 58.

    FlyingToaster (Tablet)

    @BigJimSlade: You probably left before atrocities like MIT’s Stata Center, then.

    Our new stuff tends to the weird.  Warrior Ice Arena / New Balance at Boston Landing.  The Cathedral of Science (Genzyme/Sanofi) on Soldier’s Field at Western Ave.  The multiheaded monstrosity replacing the Government Center Garage.  And, heaven help us, the Seaport…

  59. 59.

    Skepticat

    @Kelly: Your Dad was McGyver? cool. :-)

    We may be sisters; I love and identify with that story. One of three girls, I nevertheless was my father’s eldest son, and I still have many of his tools and most of what he taught me.

  61. 61.

    BigJimSlade

    @FlyingToaster (Tablet): I’ve seen the Stata Center – yeah, I’m not a fan. But most of my walks were in the Back Bay, Beacon Hill and some of downtown, and from East Cambridge (where I would see the SC) to Harvard Square. And around Jamaica Pond in the early years before moving to Winthrop. So, yeah, I can see there are some, um, weak spots.

  62. 62.

    BigJimSlade

    @Brachiator: very good quote. I remember reading that (the book, not the quote in particular) maybe 30 years ago and really liking it.

  63. 63.

    Skepticat

    Wonderfully written, JC; thank you for an indelible image.

    I lost many equivalent treasures to Hurricane Dorian. As I sorted through the wreckage of fifty-three years (which took about nine months, as I did by myself, on a tiny desert island), I did retrieve a some things that meant a great deal to me. Many were badly battered if not damaged beyond repair, but I’ve kept them because they’re perfect in my heart and memory. Now I’m being forced because of a family mess to sell my mainland home, and although I’m living temporarily in two borrowed rooms, I suppose I’ll hold on to things I really should pass along, as I’m still hoping for a home of my own again. And all that said, I know what a first-world problem this is. I don’t have anyone shooting at me, nor do I have to watch out for timed mines. A category 6 hurricane is nothing compared to indiscriminate war crimes and genocide.

  64. 64.

    opiejeanne

    @OzarkHillbilly: I lost most of my grandfather’s and great grandfather’s garden tools when the greenhouse burned down, like old pitchforks and an oddball rake.

    Fire, floods, war, they all wipe out things we love and can’t replace.

  65. 65.

    Medicine Man

    <3 John Cole

    I have little way of processing what I’m seeing and barely enough ability to cope. I’m just not talking about it for the most part.

  66. 66.

    Chief Oshkosh

    I had just started to do business with an engineering/manufacturing group in Kharkiv at the new year. Needless to say, they are not at 100% right now…

    But what is ADDITIONALLY amazing to me beyond all that we discuss here is that, though the group tells me that they are literally being bombed and rocketed daily, they are still working on current contracted projects and developing new ones (like the one with me).

    They see a tomorrow on the other side of this. I am just gobsmacked at the determination, the resilience, the…I don’t know what to call it. It is humbling.

  69. 69.

    Gvg

    @karen marie:  hit estate sales. You can find some good cooking stuff at them. Estates.net. I hit local ones when I don’t have something else to do. Found good cooking spoons that way, clearly ones that last and do a good job. So far, no brand that I can know to shop for more. Most of my good pans came this way too.
    I’d like to finds some good knives next.

  70. 70.

    Bupalos

    I really think there is a major difference in the “justifications.” I don’t think people really quite understand the meaning of putin’s “denazification.” The ukrainians understand. That’s why they will fight to the death. And we better hope they win.

  71. 71.

    Wetzel

    I keep pulling myself up with a rope, carrying an idea to the surface then I forget it. I’m glad to wake up but it’s the worst feeling to try to find the song in your memory, but there was no hand off from you the dream register Now you are the working memory, and there might not have been any song at all that was worth anything. There was something. It was complete. I’ll wonder for the rest if life if I could have held on to it but then this is the 3rd night. There I almost had it. I picked up my  phone to use memo and in looking for the ap I went and forgot to remember. This battle with art is the only way I have it to stay alive because everything else has failure in it and sinks like the pain in my chest. We are all somebody. I am disappearing like a credit score after opening a dream business. I am the best song I’ve ever written that just disappeared.

    When suddenly dyeing the blueness I began to feel delirious

    The slow rhythms of the boat got concordiant and mysterious

    Stronger than White Claw bigger than my guitar

    The flames of Love poked through like a pin. It was the night’s first star.

     

    I’ve seen the lightning and the thunderstorms

    Driving the lake surf and current down to be reborn

    During the night I sank down to the lake bed to die

    Then dawn was spreading her rosy fingers across the sky

     

    I’m alright. It was a good song. I know it’s still there.

  72. 72.

    oldster

    Beautiful, Cole.

    It reminded me of this:

    These things by women saved

    are all we have of them

    or of those dear to them.

    These ribboned letters, snapshots

    faithfully glued for years

    onto the scrapbook page

    these scraps, turned into patchwork,

    doll-gowns, clean white rags,

    for stanching blood,

    the bride’s tea-yellow handkerchief

    the child’s height penciled on the cellar door

    In this cold barn we dream

    a universe of humble things —

    and without these no memory,

    no faithfulness, no purpose for the future,

    no honor to the past.

    Adrienne Rich

    Sorry if I mistranscribed anything.

    Anyhow, John, she was a famous poet, and your essay compares well.

    Thank you.

  73. 73.

    wetzel

    @oldster:

    One of the joys of my life was to get fed dinner by Adrienne Rich along with a half dozen students in the little poetry class taught by a friend of hers. It was one of those things a person does nothing to deserve but make them feel like somebody, and it was the first really great salad I’d ever eaten. I was a freshman from Georgia. It was all iceberg in the 80’s.

    Hey John! I went back to sleep after the last post, and woke up with something. I struggled to keep in my memory   ‘paprika garlic lemon’. I was dreaming up a soup!

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