Fast-tracking the "Aprikosenkuchen"--an American Mistake with a German Recipe

Many German recipes require time and patience--and I have almost none of either. But apricots are in season and I love that stuff you can get at the bakery, usually with plums, a kind of long square tart, fruit set into dough, sweet but not too sweet, occasionally topped with whipped cream. Looks easy. I bought a quantity of apricots, made sure I had butter, eggs, sugar, dry yeast, milk, and flour. I also imagined, when I rose at 6:45, that I'd be washing down delicious tart with my coffee by around 7:30.
To do so, I would have had to get up around 4:00 a.m.
Oh, like a real baker.
Yes. 

There's the part where you dissolve the dry yeast in warm milk and mix it with the already prepared butter-egg-flour-pinch o' salt-sugar mix. But after that you're supposed to let the bowl cool its heels in a warmish location for another 45 minutes. Then there's the rolling out of the dough, after which it gets to rise, in the pan, for another 20 minutes (while you're whipping up the pudding of your choice to apply with the apricots).

I was very hungry indeed, also in a hurry--American traits. No, maybe just New Yorker traits. I gave that dough fifteen minutes (during which it did seem to bubble up a tad), then said, "ready or not, here I come" and hoped, idiotically, for the best. Poured it onto a buttered pan, schlonked in the apricots, baked for around half an hour. 

It was edible, gentle reader, but just barely. If I hadn't been absolutely starving, I would have said the unrisen dough had a gluelike texture. Whipped cream would have been a good idea, if I'd had any. 

But that whipping of the cream, even with a mixer takes time, too . . . 

The Loss of Rachel Held Evans, Unifying Christian Voice

On May 4, 2019, Rachel Held Evans died unexpectedly in a Nashville, TN hospital.

She was a theologian an atheist could love. Like C.S. Lewis in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Mere Christianity, and in his better-known Narnia books, Evans wrote with humor, commonsense, and openness about her own spiritual crises. Raised to believe that all non-Christians burned in hell forever, she learns as a middle-school student that Anne Frank and her sister died of typhus in a concentration camp. Staring at Anne’s photo on the cover of her paperback, Evans begs God to “let her out of the lake of fire” for being a Jew. She notices that her Sunday school teachers spoke of hell as a place for Hitler, not his victims, and she’s quick to observe inconsistencies: if her Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, she reflected, then hell would be populated not just by Hitler and Stalin, Hussen and Milosevic but by “the people that they persecuted.” As a college student, she watches the televised execution by the Taliban of a Muslim woman in a soccer stadium in Kabul and seriously interrogates her fundamentalist belief that only Christians enter heaven: “The idea that this woman passed from agony to agony, from torture to torture, from a lifetime of pain and sadness to an eternity of pain and sadness, all because she had less information about the gospel than I did, seemed cruel, even sadistic.” At that point she experienced the transformative spiritual crisis that is almost inevitable with the constitutionally honest. Against all odds, she rejected easy hatred for difficult love.   

She will be remembered for her bravery in rejecting dogma for questions, even or especially when these sent her into spiritual agony: “What makes a faith crisis so scary is that once you allow yourself to ask one or two questions, more inevitably follow.”  Doubters of all faiths and those of none admire her skill in setting down, in crystal clear prose how unsettling, even terrifying it is to ask questions that shatter one’s entire sense of identity.

In her online congregation, she brought together young and old who were looking for a God of love who didn’t automatically dump them in hell for being gay, questioning the patriarchy, or wondering, as she did, why tickets to heaven could only be offered to Christians. In the polarized world of Donald Trump, she brought together the disparate groups he keeps divided. Her voice will be greatly missed.

Master Archie, Royal Baby

And Veronica?
And Mehitabel?
Surnamed Leach? (or Cox, or Macleish, or Roosevelt?) Given a choice, I'd take the poet. The kid has a cute name. 
Yes, he could grow up to be the clueless boyfriend of a sweepingly narcissistic, credit-card cracking daughter of a "big shot" politician.
Or he could, using magic or reincarnation, become a pensive, philosophical cockroach who goes for a much-more-in-the-know alley cat.
(Wow! This sounds like his mom and dad. Sorry, should have said mum and dad.)
Or hey, Cary Grant, or the poet, or America's version of royalty.
Whatever junior wants, he can become . . . except a commoner, unless mum and dad have their way and terminate the monarchy. They wouldn't do that, would they? No, but they might extract their son and his future siblings from future commitments to wearing a crown.
Meanwhile, isn't he the cutest little baby you ever did see? (except for your own, of course!) 

The King of Thailand Has a House in Munich (To the tune of "The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain")

Reuter's headline: King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun will be officially crowned as the 10th king of the Chakri dynasty. 

Happy coronation!





The king of Thailand has a house in Munich!
Where Weisswurst, Weizen plentifully flow
The weather's colder and and the laws are freer!

Now once again!
Where does he reign?

His Lèse-majesté lets him flex his muscles!
Where curry's aromatic and quite spicy!
But not in Bayern where they make the bee-er!

Now once again!
Where does he reign?

Lake Starnberg's resident's twelve million mansion
Seems roomier than Thailand's tiny throne
But folks can call him "Blödman" when he's he-re!

Now once again!
Where does he reign?

His bodyguard's his queen and she will pop them
Wherever she finds reason to do so!
In Munich, where the pretzels and beer flow.

Now once again!
Where does he reign?