Kimberly Townsend Palmer

Hideous little fact, but if you torture somebody long enough, they’ll
eventually tell you whatever they think you want to hear. Eventually
they’ll start confessing to things they haven’t even done. Spy-factoid.

In the face of internet spy accusations, I used to launch a rather pathetic
wail, “but I’m a real person!” Forget all that, from now on I’m just going
to run with it, embrace the idea. So, I confess, I’m a spy, like Agent 99 on
Get Smart. Sometimes they even let me use the shoe phone.

In truth, on the internet being accused of being a spy, an agent provocateur,
a subversive, a troll, a government agent, is a pretty routine thing. People can’t
see you and until they know you, they tend to perceive you as a threat. (Once they
know you, they REALLY perceive you as a threat, but I digress.) To make the whole

birdman by topinaris, flickr

My father is a birdman. By instinct the birds know him as a living man and not a statue and so they hover near his still, sitting frame, standing on their little bird legs, perching on his shoulders and knees, poking their heads into his pockets looking for seed.

My mother declared him petrified, useless. That was before she left him, she a bird herself flown from our little yellow kitchen of continuous spaghetti dinners and fried bologna sandwiches.

My father is quite an active man though as I grew I came to understand just not active in the direction desired by my mother. “Son,” he says to me, “Every bird in the city will be fed by sundown, he says, every bird will get their taste of my cones.” At night he coats pinecones with peanut butter and rolls them through birdseed.

He teaches me what…

#MyFirstBlogPostRevisited
(hold tight the riders)

Thank you very much to Jeff of Eclectic Music Lover (great site) for nominating me for the prestigious My First Blog Post Revisited challenge.

Here are the rules for this challenge:

• No cheating. (It must be your first post. Not your second post, not one you love…first post only.
• Link back to the person who tagged you (thank them if you feel like it or, if not, curse them with a plague of crickets).
• Cut and paste your first post into a new post or reblog it. (Either way is fine but NO editing.)
• Put the hashtag #MyFirstPostRevisited in your title.
• Tag five (5) other bloggers to take up this challenge.
• Notify your tags (don’t just hope they notice a pingback somewhere in their spam).
• Feel free to cut and paste the badge to use in your post.
• Include “the rules” in your post.

The…

I feel like I want to take a pass on Passover this year. I’ve done it before. I tried to do the whole thing last year – closing up cabinets and shopping for matzo meal and gefilte fish and kosher for Passover candy. I spent an inordinate amount of time looking up articles about kitniyot (some Jews say that beans and corn and rice are fine for Passover, others say no, based on which crops used to grow next to other crops way back when). It is, of course, a fascinating debate. I made a double recipe of Sephardi Charoset (dates and figs and chestnuts and wine and on and on) and resolved to think Passover thoughts for the whole week. But, I didn’t have a Seder to go to, and I hate (really, really hate) Matzo.

Sephardi Charoset on Matzo is much yummier than it looks (not my…