C
ocktail time: Carrot Cake
No frosting necessary. Give it a minute. It makes it’s own.
4.0 oz fresh carrot juice (including those little red and purple ones from the garden
.25 oz St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram
.5 oz Domaine Canton Ginger Liqueur
.5 oz Mandarine Napoleon
1.75 oz Pampero Anniversario
3-5 drops Bittercube Blackstrap bitters
Shake over ice and strain into a doubles glass with a fancy ice globe. Garnish with blackstrap bitters.
I bought a set of Neewer LED photographer/video lights about 6 weeks ago via Amazon. The power unit on a lighting rig should not be blinking erratically, after about 20 minutes of use, so that cut the number of light sources down in my test shoot tonight to two.
Can’t say I’m pleased with this, but I do like how the pictures came out with the lights I had left.
Here’s a sample.
Those images are attached to this post.
Families sitting in tent cities, big warehouses full of dog runs, now filled with people, and baby jails in Texas right now are asylum-seekers.
We need immigration policy that includes a path to citizenship, process for those seeking asylum so they are not separated from their families, and to allow folks to be able to seek education and employment in this country. This country’s strength and innovation has relied on our ability to keep the doors open and to provide shelter and a place to seek a better life.
Immigration makes us a stronger nation. Fear and hatred only makes us weak.
We also need better foreign policy so we aren’t in our actions creating conditions that force people to leave their homes, lives and families, risk death from smugglers and exposure crossing deserts or riding in the backs of enclosed trucks without access to air, in an attempt to come to a country that was once seen as the place where poor, huddled masses came, attracted by the light of the torch and the words associated with the Statue of Liberty, yearning to breathe free and work toward a better life.
We would all fare better as human beings if folks could find liberty and breathe free wherever we are, and wherever we choose to be.
It’s the anniversary of when people abducted from a continent along with their treasures were “freed.”
The treasures weren’t returned. They sit in people’s wood paneled dens – dovetailed and wainscoated and carved, often by slave labor, from trees long since stolen and decimated elsewhere. Teaks and mahoganies, and other woods named by thieves pretending to be discovering things that already belonged to other people, their given names no longer remembered, and the forests now dust blown stinking pits that make the elephants travel thousands of miles in a season to find an ever narrowing selection of growing things to eat, and their numbers dwindle as new thieves try to capture the magic in their tusks and horns, shot by desperate and hungry men, too trying to find something to eat.
Treasures and heirlooms of families drowned in the middle passage, locked behind glass, slowly rotting in museums bearing the same names as ancestors of the owners of those wood paneled rooms. It’s hard to return treasures when you’ve killed those who know the stories, and confused the survivors and made it impossible to know our ancestors, so it’s quite easy to deny claims and even easier to justify the theft by calling it a “collection” and hiring a curator to tell just enough but not the whole story of the object behind the glass.
Not repaid for centuries of enslavement – reparations went to the plantations owners for “lost property.”
Not “freed” exactly, because the Thirteenth amendment has a loophole, and if you can write laws to criminalize behavior, or keep people from making a living via poor health care, poor education, lower pay, and other systemic obstacles, you can funnel people into prison, or the military, and then sell their labor to defray the cost of care for them.
So I guess we can acknowledge that today is the anniversary of the day that wealthy White folks moved the goalposts again, and created this weird concept in this country – a concept called, “freedom.”
0.5 oz Aperol
0.5 oz St. Germain Liqueur
0.5 oz Grand Marnier
1.5 oz Bombay Sapphire Gin
5 ice cubes
3-5 Drops Jamaican #2 Bitters
5 oz Izze Pink Grapefruit Soda.
Shake booze over ice, then strain over new ice, so you don’t wind up with ice shards in your drink.
Top with soda in a Collins glass and garnish with bitters.
Nice way to wrap a hectic week, to fight off the darkness brought to us by the news, and a pleasant end to Pride Week here in DC.
My drawings below.
One of my models braved the rain and resisted napping to come and sit for me.
