Not much to see here, just three links to three weeks worth of veggies. No descriptions in the titles on these as I was rushed. Sorry. I might put them up on flickr later, as captions or whatever you call those.

Week 15
Week 16
Week 17

I will go ahead and say that the funny gnobby ridgey vegetable in Week 15 is Celeriac, which sadly I didn’t get to eat as it went bad almost instantly (perils of organic farming), but supposedly tastes like, well, celery.

The black radishy things in Week 17 are Black Japanese (or Korean?) radishes. They’re strongish and I like them a lot.

That’s it for now. Peace, veggie lovers.

A few days ago I got an email spam from Sen. Leahy asking me to support his new bill to remove the antitrust exemption from insurance companies.

You know, the thing that allows them to create monopolies in most American cities so that you either pay whatever they ask, or just die in the street like a dog.

I agree with the bill, but I know those standard form emails don’t impress a lot of people, so I amended the one he has autogenerated to express a more personal message, and it was supposed to be sent on to my Congresswoman and two Senators.

Here’s my version:

I know you probably get a lot of these form emails, so I’m writing this part myself.

Not that I disagree with anything in the standard Leahy form email, but I think you get the background on the issue. Insurance companies are evil. Evil by design. I can’t imagine who thought, back in the dawn of time, that creating a system whose incentives drive companies to kill people for profit was a good idea. Honestly.

At the very least, we should force them to compete for the right to deny us basic lifesaving care. Perhaps that way we can cut the death toll, which currently stands at 45 thousand per year in this country.

Number of people who die in the rest of the industrialized world due to lack of health insurance? Basically zero. God bless America.

That’s why I really, truly do urge you to support the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act, S. 1681 and H.R. 3596.

If we must live our lives in a health insurance version of The Running Man, let’s at least try to keep the judges honest.

PS: Single-payer would make supporting this legislation unnecessary, as well as save the lives of 15 9/11s worth of innocent people a year. Just a thought.

I meant to do a writeup of Taste of Madison when we went, almost a month ago now, but I never got around to it. Funny that; I’ve been slacking off a lot.

I would blame some new medication I’m on from my doctor, but quite frankly, we all know I’m a slacker at heart.

Ok, so, Taste of Madison is yet another Madison festival around the Capitol, much like Art Fair on the Square, Freakfest on Halloween (which also uses State Street), and the like. (There really is a ton to do in this town.)

Taste of Madison is foodie-related, however, as local restaurants gather around the square to sell samples of their cooking to a ravenous public, all, apparently, in the name of fundraising forUnited Cerebral Palsy of Dane County

I don’t have a lot of pictures, but I did catch this one with my mother eating some beer battered, deep fried cheese curds from The Old Fashioned.

They were pretty good, though much heavier on the beer batter than the cheese.

Particular standouts this year for me were Joey’s Seafood and Grill, which had some fantastic lightly breaded halibut and this great appetizery shrimp thing called Firecracker Shrimp*, Lombardino’s, which had a terrific Italian beef sandwich with Chianti, Brat und Brau, which made the first brat I’ve ever actually liked, and Antojitos el Toril, which had the softest tortillas I’ve ever eaten to frame a very respectable chicken taco. Yum.

It was great to get out and try a bunch of places I’d had on my list to visit, all in one day. Even better that it was a fun social event for a good cause.

Though pairing it up on the same weekend that I went to Samba might have been a bad idea… oy, the gluttony.