Signature Sandwich

Folks,

I believe I just invented a potential franchise sandwich. Forget your Panini's and your Skyline Chili dogs. This beats all.

I take a whole wheat pita. Line it with hummus. I plop in spoonfuls of tabouli (middle eastern dish made from chopped parsley, tomatoes, bulgar wheat and lemon & lime juice), and throw in a bed of assorted lettuce greens. Next comes a mixture of shredded cheeses: cheddar, monterrey jack and colby (a familiar "Mexican blend" you can find in supermarkets). I then wait for the sausages, they come next to melt the cheese. I choose organic sausages, something spicy. On top of that goes chopped raw onions and spicy brown mustard. To finish it off is some very vinegary, non-sweet, homemade salsa (I don't even know what's in the salsa, but its great).

It eats like the best overstuffed hotdog you ever had.

This is a very ingredient-specific recipe. You can buy all this stuff and have it taste differently depending on which bread, which tabouli, which salsa, etc. But let me tell you--when its right, its right. Its worth trying out!

As Fate Would Have It

I just sort of had a feeling. My dad lent me his car this week, since my car decided to quit on me. I just had a feeling deep down that somehow, someway, that car was not going to be returned in the mint condition I borrowed it in. This has happened before. I was careful, even planned on washing it before returning it (a rare thing for me to do for my own cars).

I enjoyed the rainstorm today. It washed some of that that northern Ohio salt off the thing (they have snow up there). Then, as I'm talking to my mom on the phone, I could hear the sudden rat-a-tat of hail. It turned furious. I realized his car was sitting out there on the street, so I quickly got off the phone and leapt outside. In the middle of a lightening storm, and sloshing through flash flooded waters, I guided the thing into the carport. I never even thought it would fit. The landlord fixed up the carport by installing some support beams. Coupled with a sharp turn to get in, the "fix up" had rendered the carport a little less than a bicycle storage unit for the stalls on the ends.

Well, necessity breeds invention, so I moved some bikes out of the way, stepped in deep muddy waters to and navigated the thing safely in. A quick glance showed the roof covered in little hailstones. A quick feel didn't turn up any dents. I'll check it later. The hailstones seem a lot smaller than the ones from last year's storm that produced a bounty of insurance claims around town.

I Did Not Shoot The Deputy

Okay, here's taking a shot at Bob Marley's "I Shot The Sheriff", assuming there is some sort of coherent meaning to it all:

Its not hard to see why Bob Marley would shoot the sheriff, or at least be accused of doing it. Sheriff John Brown was an instrument of racial oppression, and represented everything white (not brown) in post-colonial Jamaica. He delighted in killing the young seedlings of growth and justice of the impoverished, oppressed black people, before they ever had a chance to blossom and flourish.

But what's all that stuff about the deputy? Heck, he freely admits to shooting the sheriff. The whole point of contention in the song is whether or not he killed the deputy. There's never any question that he killed the sheriff. But it seems he has to account more for shooting the deputy than the sheriff.

I don't know much about Jamaican society, so this is every bit of a hunch as anything: Bob Marley IS the deputy. I don't even know if black people could have been deputies in the society Bob Marley's talking about, but assuming they could, let's explore this:

When the deputy kills the sheriff, people may have said that narrator threw his own life away. Instead of rising up and overthrowing an oppressive force in order to create a new life for himself, he has just wasted his own life as well as the life of the sheriff. Now, he's either going to hang or face prison. But it is the narrator who sees this act as a life giving sacrifice--dare we say Christ-like--in the sense that by sacrificing his life he brings about a renewed life for himself. [I'm not going to say that Christ would have approved of the murder, but just to show the paschal nature of this deed.]

When the deputy rises up and killed off his oppressive ruler, who used him as an instrument to keep his own people down, he truly affirms his own life. By shooting the Sherff he did not--as he was accused--also shoot the deputy. The deputy lives.