Month: August 2011

There’s a woman in the East Lake neighborhood of B’ham that lost her 100-year-old red oak tree to a lightning strike…but not quite.  The tree surgeons suggested that it be ground down, but she said ‘no’ and instead…

“The Lion of Judah is very strong. But yet, it’s going to be holding a butterfly, this lion. So that it has strength, but yet it has compassion and love, too,” said Rivers.

The artist who made the lion is Andy Cummings from Indian Springs, Alabama.

I wonder if it would be wrong for me to switch dentists just so I could go to the one with this installation that Andy did in the office.

Chris Monroe, who owns a pie stand in Arkansas called “Hunka Pie” baked 100 pies in one day.

He has me beat by a long shot.  The best I’ve been able to do is 28, when I filled up this table (shortly after this pic was taken in 2005).  I bake pies for every major holiday: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, for a church about ten minutes from my home who serve the hungry.  I always try to beat my record.  But 100?  I wish!  Plus: those were 100 pies, each different.  Wow.

For a few years when Av and I were first married, I made ten pies every Sunday morning for this particular church, and we thought it was so cute and funny because at the time, they gave Av a key.  So Av had a key to that church, and a key to our synagogue.

How many people can say that?!  So sweet.

This week, I made one pie: grits pie.  Basically it’s chess pie + grits.

Really, really nice.

The Commercial Appeal is doing a great series on ‘Abandoned Memphis’ right now.

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(I am not a fan, at all, of either of the people in the midst of this, but…)

Thank you, Frank Bruni, for pointing out the ‘unsavory culinary elitism‘ that reared its ugly head last week.  Wondering: when will the duck confit disappear from the menu at Les Halles?  Bavette de Boeuf, who will order you without the blue cheese sauce?  Paleron, Bernaise…minus the bernaise?  And Hamburger Rossini, what will you be called without your house-made foie gras terrine melting on top?

…glass houses…

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Vodka may be produced in New Orleans soon.

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Oh, BP, BP, BP.  Sigh.

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On a very happy note, I can’t wait to buy Amy Smyth’s cards at Target when they arrive in mid-September.

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Frank Lloyd Wright designed six hotels, and one of them is restored and once again accepting reservations.  In Iowa.

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The ‘recession special’ at Robert’s Western World in Nashville is a PBR, fried bologna sandwich, chips, and a Moon Pie or Goo-Goo Cluster for $5.  Meanwhile in New Orleans, the COOLinary menu at restaurants ends soon, but I’m thinking about the lunch at Commander’s.

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One of Gehry’s projects in Utah (which would have included the tallest building in the state) isn’t going anywhere right now…but his 76-story ‘New York by Gehry‘ is now open.  And beautiful.

The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi that Gehry designed is going to be giving free admission to Mississippi residents on Labor Day.

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Glorious summertime!  Shug has decided he loves cicadas (I always have too!), and the praying mantis.  Here, both boys find something so interesting in a mason jar:

…because…how could you not fall in love with this little alien face, right!?

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My friend Greg let me pick muscadines at his home last week; u-pick muscadines at the big farms will probably open up everywhere the first part of September.  We’ve gone to Wenker’s Vineyard in Marshall County the last two or three years.

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Greg went with me on my latest visit to Wade Whartons’s home/art environment last week — new tulips from shovels:

a bull from a bicycle seat and handlebars (and Wade is working on another new piece…something like a superhero mosquito):

If you have any interest in Alabama pottery, you should know Joey Brackner and his (*fantastic, encyclopedic*) book, Alabama Folk Pottery.

I know Joey, so when I found these curious markers in a Walker County cemetery, I asked him what he thought.  He says they were made by the Loyd family in Pine Springs, near Sulligent.

Sure enough, there’s a picture of a very similar marker in his book.  The Loyds did register a US patent for stoneware tombstones in 1879, and they kept making these into the 1890s.  They’re all salt glazed with cobalt decoration.  

We saw this on the way to the Bright Star in Bessemer, Alabama: