The Real Mother Goose Blog

Attacks on Egyptian Women Sparks Uproar

2011-12-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

An informative article on today's Reuters Africa details the plight of women activists in Egypt. No one should be kicked in the belly. Stripping a muslim woman of her veil, baring her torso, exposing her bra and then beating her is an outrage on so many fronts. Given images and events like these, it is astounding that so many brave young people still march in protest. Our thoughts and best wishes are with our activists, all over the world, as they try so hard to show us a better way to live.

Punch and Judy

Fought for a pie;

Punch gave Judy

A knock in the eye.

Says Punch to Judy,

Will you have any more?

Says Judy to Punch

My eye is too sore.

OWS March to Washington D.C.

2011-11-10T14:40:00.001-08:00

It's Happening! Brave Kids, we love you!

Robin Hood

Has gone to the wood;

He'll come back again

If we are good.

Unfair and Biased Negative Journalism Hurts our Democracy

2011-10-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

Today's Los Angeles Times reports on a study by The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The findings, using software developed by a Harvard University expert on Quantitative Analysis shows biased and unfair reporting on our current President. Here is the link:

Media coverage of Obama largely negative, study finds

Go to www.Whitehouse.gov if you want to see what President Obama and his strong administration are doing for our country.

I'm not surprised that the current reporting is so biased in support of Perry and other candidates and to the detriment of President Obama, but I am sad. What would Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and all the other hero reporters with principles have to say about this?

Miss One, Two, and Three

Could never agree,

While they gossiped around

A tea-caddy.

Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo, fishy in the sea!

2011-03-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

I want to devote this entry to the wonderful animation of Hayao Miyazaki and the amazing brave spirit of the Japanese people as they survive the earthquakes, tsunami and radiation nightmares of the last week. We love you Japan!

My children are uplifted by Miyazaki's beautiful animations: Ponyo, Totorro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Spirited Away, Nausicaa, Howl's Moving Castle...the list goes on.

I recommend absolutely all of them.

If you are ever lucky enough to visit Japan, you might like to visit the Ghibli Museum, created by Miyazaki and his team. I hope to see it someday and until then, will make do with websites that celebrate the museum. (Google "Ghibli Museum" to find many fan sites.) The museum opens tomorrow, March 21, the 2nd day of spring, after being closed for earthquake repairs.

Totorro takes tickets!

a growing green view from above...

cup of cafe au lovely!

Other Things I've Been Up To

2011-01-25T13:33:00.000-08:00

Awful to discover today that a gazillion broken graphics showed their little x's all over MotherGoose.com. Over the holidays, when traffic is slower, I asked my hosting service to migrate MotherGoose.com to a linus server. This will allow me to add goodies in the future like a social area for chat, a multi-user paint game, daily rhyme, etc. The move seemed to go without mishap, but truthfully, I didn't check over the whole site.

Today I did start to dig around, and found all those broken graphics, ouch! It turned out to be one of those stupid-simple fixes, though the fix is clumsy. I've berated myself a bit, but it's been tough juggling two sites, though I'm determined. I've been a bit coy about this, but my grand mother-of-a-plan involves spinning out some new domains (and some subdomains too) to expand what I can create.

I love children, particularly my own, but also really, really want to write and draw and animate and design for an older audience. That's why I started the "Just for Moms" section on MotherGoose.com and that's why I'm thick in the middle of a new site Click Here if You Love Me. My new site is a romance novel game, and I hope you like it. It's a work in progress right now, I suppose at first draft stage. But if you're interested in testing it out, and would like to send me comments (there is a guestbook there, or you can email me: leslie@mothergoose.com), I would sooooooooooooooo appreciate it!

When I was a little girl,

About seven years old,

I hadn't got a petticoat,

To keep me from the cold.

So I went into Darlington,

That pretty little town,

And there I bought a petticoat,

A cloak, and a gown.

I went into the woods

And built me a kirk,

And all the birds of the air,

They helped me to work.

The hawk, with is long claws,

Pulled down the stone;

The dove with her rough bill,

Brought me them home.

The parrot was the clergyman,

The peacock was the clerk,

The bullfinch played the organ,

And we made merry work.

Valentines Day

2011-01-19T13:31:00.000-08:00

Soon it will be Valentines Day and now is the time to get little hands busy with paper, scissors, glue and markers, glitter and lace. MotherGoose.com offers a number of creative valentine activities. You can design your own valentines and print them out; make Mr. & Mrs. Heart, a loving couple made entirely of hearts; construct Victor, the Valentine Snake...a big hit with little boys and for girls, his friend Victoria is a lot of fun too. You can print and color your own valentines, and find lots of vintage valentine clip art to add extra romantic pizzazz to your projects.

Dear Abby has lately published a number of letters by readers who were upset to learn that some people don't appreciate hand-made cards, and instead only place value on store-bought ones. There are certainly lovely cards for sale, and I'm sure they are much appreciated when received, but if you have a chance to make something yourself, and to teach a child to fold paper, decorate it and write a kind greeting, please do!

An easy and full-proof greeting card can be made with one piece of printer paper and a black marker. Fold the paper in half, then in half again. This makes a sturdy card that can stand on its own for display. Ask your child to draw a picture on the front with the black marker. The picture can be of anything...a fun design of hearts, a self-portrait, a picture of your home, or of a flower or favorite pet. Open the card and on the inside, write a simple greeting such as "Happy Valentine's Day!" Use lots of exclamation points and other decorations like stars, dots, wiggly lines, tiny hearts and flowers. Ask you child to sign the card with "Sincerely, " or "I love you," or "Best Wishes," and their name.

The card is now ready to give...or you can use crayons paint or markers to color-in the drawing, add sparkle with glitter and stickers, even glue fabric or buttons on for extra dimension. Then hand your lovely creation to a dear friend to wish them well.

Holiday Hiatus

2010-11-23T14:21:00.000-08:00

If you're like me, or I'm like you, then, beginning with spooky Halloween, the Holiday Season is upon us. I'm edging aside the more ghostly, witchy orange and black stuff for the more autumny, leafy, harvesty type of stuff. That'll stay up and around the house through Thanksgiving, and then we'll make the switch to evergreens and lights 'cause the days are getting shorter and the nights much darker and longer and brrrrrrrr, colder.

I really do like this time of year, crisp air, frost & snow, shopping and menu-planning. Enacting favorite traditions for the kids and hosting lots of visitors leaves little time, however, for my web pursuits like building out www.MotherGoose.com, finishing-up my top-secret for Moms ONLY (and adults who like gothic romances)new site - more on that soon!, and blogging here on The Real Mother Goose Blog, and tweeting a bit on @RealMotherGoose, and posting on facebook.com/RealMotherGoose...phew! I'm going to give it all one more whirl but will be turning into a pumpkin pie with all the trimmings in just another two days!

(This year I am going to wrap a small pumpkin in foil, bake it overnight at about 200 degrees and turn it, somehow, into the favorite Thanksgiving confection. See www.Chow.com for how-tos).

MotherGoose.com offers a few holiday things created over the years: a collection of Youtube Thanksgiving videos, Canoe Race to the Feast! game, a Turkey Garland decoration craft. I wanted to make some turkey clip art this year but didn't get to it. Perhaps next year.... Moving on to the more wintry holidays, MotherGoose.com offers a snowflake music game, snowman clip art, vintage holiday paper chain craft, a snow fairy animation and paper craft and a bunch of holiday cartoons (click on "Holiday Hiatus" to find them). Someday I will create an animated Advent calendar, but not yet as this is still the season when I have little kids, stockings to stuff, baking, baking, baking for school holiday parties and brown paper packages wrapped up in string and shipped in the nick of time.

So though I mean to blog more often, tweet twixt times and create more games, those things are set aside, for now, to be a real mom who cooks from scratch and folds the laundry before pitching it into piles in each relevant bedroom. One good thing about coding, web design & writing though, is that much of it can be done in my head while my hands are busy with pie dough and pigtail ornaments. But to relieve the stress a little, I'm taking a formal hiatus from my web activities until the New Year, unless inspired to blog or draw clip art by a quiet fireside evening, the tree all trimmed and kiddies asleep in their beds, visions of sugarplums...!

Thank You Gary Rosenzweig

2010-10-07T16:10:00.000-07:00

Today I finished another game, well maybe not finished, they never are, but published. You can find
Fetch That Cat! on MotherGoose.com. The game is inspired by this Mother Goose nursery rhyme:

Diddlety, diddlety, dumpty
The cat ran up the plum tree.
Half a crown to fetch her down,
Diddlety, diddlety, dumpty.

Fetch That Cat! nursery rhyme game on http://www.mothergoose.com/

Please understand, I am not much of a programmer. More of a hacker, truly. But I love making games and enjoy the distracting puzzle they present at night when sleep hovers above the bed like a helicopter that won't land. Sometimes I make my games from scratch, and sometimes I leaf through Gary Rosenzweig's generous classic Macromedia Flash MX Actionscript for Fun & Games.

And here it is, still available though nearing it's sell-by date. Adobe now owns Flash and Actionscript is at version 3. A real threat to my ageing fun and games!

Mr. Rosenzweig has a solution to this (and I've bookmarked it) with his website http://www.flashgameu.com/. When next my head is above water, I plan to attend Mr. Rosenzweig's University and step up to the challenges posed by Actionscript 3.0, by all acounts more of a C programming environment and less of a friendly "scripting-for-artists" space.

I called Rosenzaweig's book "generous" and by that I mean that he lays out the complete code to create any number of classic arcade games and puzzles. The code is bare-bones and the author walks you through it all and then offers pointers as to how extra features can be added in. The code for each game is also provided on CD. This makes it a snap to create games using Mr. Rosenzweig's smart, readable code as a starting point. So many "how to" programming books are either written way above my comprehension level or with the guru wizard jealously guarding his secrets throughout. Either that, or the first 8 chapters are devoted to using the drawing tools and basic editing functions, while the last 2 confound me with huge chunks of undecipherable sample code.

O.k., so while I was raising babies, the world changed but my old-fashioned ways (CDs, Actionscript 1 & 2, Flash MX, for gawd sakes!) have worked great for quite awhile and happily, Mr. Rosenzweig is holding out a hand to lead me (and you, if you're a wannabe programmer like me) into the future.

In Memory of Tyler Clementi

2010-10-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

Robin and Richard, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright,
The Real Mother Goose, 1916.

ROBIN AND RICHARD
Robin and Richard
Were two pretty men,
They lay in bed
Till the clock struck ten;
Then up starts Robin
And looks at the sky,
Oh, brother Richard,
The sun's very high.
You go before
With the bottle and bag,
And I will come after
On little Jack Nag.

Mother Goose loved all her children. She celebrated their fine points and their foibles in rhyme after rhyme. None of us are different in the essentials, and never have been. We are all very, very much the same. Kindness and courtesy must prevail or we are human to no avail.

Big-Footed Goose Mama

2010-09-28T18:01:00.000-07:00

Here is something my doctor told me today, and take this with a grain of salt, but still, I found it fascinating. She told me that women with big feet have easier labors. I'd heard the one about men with big feet having big ...! And this sounds like kind of the inverse of that, if you know what I mean ;-)

I confess to size 9.5, even size 10 feet. You know, the size that shares the sales racks with shoes for cross-dressers! They defiinitely swelled to size 10 with each pregnancy and I remember buying these huge size 10 (maybe even 11) suede black boots that I just lived in during the first pregnancy, stomping to the office each morning during the lead-up to a December birth. Actually, I kind of love those boots in hindsight. They hid my swollen calves and made me feel snazzy (black, leather), even though all of a sudden I was like a freight tanker sailing into the office each day in my paisley-patterned plus-sized mumus.

The doctor, who is an amazing midwife and life-long health practioner, asked me if my labors were easy and having experienced them 3 times, I had to say "yes". Whenever I see those t.v. shows with birthing women screaming, I always tut-tut! and declare to my kids and anyone else around, "No way is it that bad. They're just overacting!" Truly, giving birth, for me, was easy. I'm lucky...and I have big feet!

As did Queen Bertha, the big-footed, or goose-footed, progenitor of Charlemagne and one more milestone in the ever un-twining Mother Goose myth. Maybe Bertha earned that name for having an easy time bringing kids into the world. Maybe it was just a simple matter of observation to realize that women with big feet have babies easily. Maybe any woman who spent her time easily and happily with a load of kids was considered big-footed, or "goose-footed".

Mother GooSEO

2010-09-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

Maybe I ruined my site last night. I'm too scared to log into Adsense today to check it out. Nothing like a site redesign to throw out your back....

Thursday I paid real money to be eviscerated by an SEO firm. Actually they were quite kind, though I could tell from the receptionist's demeanor that I was not what they were hoping for - a flaky cash cow desperate to be optimized. Would it have been different if I showed up in leather, wafting perfume and jingling bracelets and expensive car keys? I wore my comfy jeans, scuffed soft clogs and unruly hair wrapped up in a bright green scarf, my current homage to Frida Kahlo. Can't help remembering the days when I was more toothsome and meetings in slick conference rooms were full of poses and flirtations. Oh well, I'm a middle-aged mom now, one of the older types who had her kids late, and I just want my site to make enough money to live off of. "Don't we all" said the sympathetic worker bee assigned to me.

Today I'm going to bake all day and cook down the motherlode of tomatoes from my garden. Sauce and pizza crust for the kids and some kind of cookies, or maybe a bundt cake, or maybe another crack at fudge which is one fascinating chemistry lesson, let me tell you. Usually I've checked my Adsense earnings at least three times by now, like a slot machine junkie, wishing for a row of cherries. Here is my dream: to make my living by my pen and my needle. If I could write this blog and write my games and draw my clip art and sew my quilts and dolls and tapestries and not have to ever dress-up and go to an office again...bliss!

So on to my SEO aspirations. I've spent the last year filling up MotherGoose.com behind-the-scenes headers with keywords. Found a great site recently, Scrub the Web, (google it) that offers a free metatag generator. You enter your title, description and keywords in three different fields and a character counter keeps you within reasonable limits. Then submit your verbiage and up comes the html that you can copy and paste into the header of your page, neat and tidy.

I've also pledged my troth to Google and pasted their Anayltyics code on the top every page on my whole, entire website which really did throw out my back and put me in bed for two days. Not sure why the back goes and not the pinky and forefinger from all that ctrl+c and then ctrl+v copy paste ad infinitum. Now I get a gazillion views of traffic data moving up and down like a jagged mountainscape with orderly columns of numbers marching alongside. Me swimming in the middle of all this is a pitiful sight given my high level of math anxiety, thus the call to the SEO firm.

I learned some good things. Like don't sell a link unless you put a "rel=nofollow" in the aref. I learned the rel=nofollow part on my own. The SEO guy warned me selling links is a bad idea as it is considered a Black Hat practice. Am I a webmistress or a villainous witchy spy? It's all so cloaked and daggery!

I also learned that I should think about how much I want to earn, not how much traffic I have. So don't focus on building up traffic so much as working the traffic you have. Building up traffic willy nilly can earn you more visits, but they might not be quality visits, i.e., they might just bounce back off your site the minute they land and never, ever click on an ad.

I learned that you want folks to exit your site via an ad.

I also learned that I should set goals, then measure them with all those Google Analytics tools and then be patient. Oh, and I should gather together some of my "mom-friends" and ask them to focus-test my site (shoot me now!) because it's very hard to navigate and a mom with a kid in her lap is going to have a hard time finding what she's looking for (don't I know that!). So what did I do?

After the meeting I went home and lay face-down on my bed, then changed into sweats, then ate some chocolate ice cream. I didn't feel very good. I felt old and deflated. Then the artist in me reared her fruit basket with birds head and screeched "no fucking way!" I grabbed some graph paper and sketched out my new homepage - voila! It came to me, as it usually does, in a vivid flash. No secondary or tertiary pages needed changing, no endless back buttons re-linked, just redo five or so pages and traffic would grow and flow and stick and exit via an ad...maybe. But maybe is all I've got right now. So, 48 hours later, the site is redesigned and I'm afraid to look!

Humpty Dumpty by Edgar Allan Poe

2010-08-31T18:11:00.000-07:00

Mother Goose Has Been Around a Long Time

2010-08-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

Mother Goose has been around longer than my childhood memories of sing-songy nursery rhymes, and my grandmother's and her grandmother's and so on. From a Paleolithic bird goddess to Aphrodite with a swan to an old crone with a pointy hat who flies past the moon, Mother Goose has entertained children and trained parents with rhyming tales of everyday life made magical and bawdy and sometimes, a little spooky. I'll never get to the bottom of all the mysteries of Mother Goose (Was she Shakespeare's peer? Was she provoked by Cotton Mather's maudlin morality tales for children and Salem witch hunt? Was she the mother of Charlemagne? Were her first rhymes bird calls repeated by humans until they became language?)

Marija Gimbutas writes of early goddess figurines, or perhaps children's playthings, found in ancient European archeological sites. Some of these figures resemble bird-women. I recommend this book if you'd like to begin at the beginning...

The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: Myths and Cult Images, New and Updated Edition

The Shadracks - Lucy Locket

2010-08-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

A Thousand Hits a Day - Part 1

2010-08-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd tell you about my plans for MotherGoose.com because writing an essay about them might rehearse the whole dance in my mind and raise the barre for the next year or so. But first, a trip back in time....

I left the big business of kids entertainment when secretly pregnant with baby number two. I'd been pregnant in an office with our daughter, born 5 years before, and felt it would be stressful to fit into another maternity business wardrobe. My husband and I had a dream of raising kids in the country, making art all day, growing vegetables and enjoying the pagan pleasures of home and hearth.

When my daughter was just an infant, at the dawn of the World Wide Web as we know it today, instinct pushed me to register the domain "MotherGoose.com" for the rainy day when the corporate world and I parted ways. So there we were, with two babies in a fixer-upper in the country, no salary and a big fat cloud of bohemian dreams. I hung out my shingle as "MotherGoose.com", got a Federal Tax ID number and began free-lancing via the Star Trek technology called "Tele-Commuting." Beam me up, Scottie.

Between gigs with Disney and International Postcards (yes, I Photoshopped diner menus and real estate ads)I started to make Flash games and web content for little kids, often featuring my own, now trio, of darling children. Once I started paying attention to my website traffic stats, I realized that MotherGoose.com always gets at least a thousand hits a day.

After much metatagging written in a repetitious parody of Gertrude Stein talking to robots, my site often gets up to 2K a day...but not much more than that. It's like a great big river, no, a quiet little stream, a gurgling brook of traffic, as dependable as a magic spring but not quite enough, yet, to water my own garden.

Still, google "Mother Goose" and I come up, today at least, as number one.

First I tried selling my games on cd, and as downloadables...that worked for awhile so there is a modest holiday fund on Paypal for dolls and rocket sets. Currently MotherGoose.com is thick with Google ads. Apparently there are two techniques with this: blend the ads in with content so users mistakenly think they are clicking on your stuff but end up in the clutches of an advertiser; or filter the ads so appropriately that your users are delighted to find ads for things they need (cute toddler clothes!) and click to buy. Either way, they leave your site, another drop of magic brook siphoned off elsewhere.

I don't need to make much, just enough for my ego, my inspiration and three kids' college tuitions.

Sometimes I work so hard on MotherGoose.com that my back goes out, and the sound of a laptop's hum makes me nauseous. Then it's days spent in the garden, quilting, cooking, finally paying attention to the kids until I degauss. But the machine always calls, the little stream travels by, day after day, with cryptic traffic reports of at least a thousand. Sometimes I wonder, if I had a little shop on the corner, and 1000 people wandered in every day, what could I sell them? What couldn't I sell them? Or maybe I wouldn't sell at all, maybe I'd just show my funny games and computer paintings, and wait for that bright moment when a Mother Goose rhyme speaks out across, well, at least a thousand years and is heard by at least 1000 users.

Any Port in a Storm

2010-08-07T10:27:00.000-07:00

Have you read about the "Doomsday Time-Shares"? I first heard of them on the nightly news. Here is a link to the company that is trying to sell these shelters all over the world, Vivos. I had no idea there were so many impending disasters until I visited the Vivos site: 2012, solar flares, giant asteroids, plagues, terrorists...those turtles tiring and hurling the earth off their backs!

A few people have already bought shares, supposedly a mixture of medical professionals, law-enforcement and military folks, worried mothers. It's poignant how fearful we all are of THE END and how much we believe underground shelter and freeze-dried food can spare us from the storm. BTW, pets stay free!

Vivos Shelter underground lounge...

PETER, PETER PUMPKIN EATER

Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater,

Had a wife and couldn't keep her;

He put her in a pumpkin shell,

And there he kept her very well.

Play the Peter Pumpkin Eater Game!

Poor Peter. He had a wife and couldn't keep a roof over her head, until he got resourceful with a giant squash. What an awful situation. Think of families today faced with foreclosure. Everyone deserves a home. Every human craves one. It doesn't have to be fancy, just warm and dry, full of good food, hobbies and inspiring books. It's a sad comment on how we humans care for one another that so many are without the simple comforts of Home.

But back to the Doomsday shelters... you can buy a plan to live underground for one year or five years. There is a spacious lobby and a medical facility. How you get there before the doors lock down, I don't know. How you ensure you're not eaten alive by your time-share mates I don't know either. Here's my disaster plan: a big bag of beans, a big bag of rice, and thou beneath the bough.

HEX

2010-07-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

I was fixing up the site this morning, which sometimes seems like just a jumble of broken links, when I came to the HEX animation page. It needed some Google analytics code and metatags so that maybe, some day, some one will find it!

It's a pretty good animation. I was humiliated by it earlier, or slightly bemused (where did that come from?), relieved it was done and glad it was obscure. But now I like it. It's very angry and poignant, historical and techno. Ever study Assembly language? Ada Lovelace & Charles Babbage? This animation is for you!

It was rejected by SIGGRAPH in 2008. Nothing new there. Oh well. Here are some stills from HEX:

How does this relate to Mother Goose? Well, I do a lot of creative stuff besides the web site. And I love early American art and witchy things like Hex Signs. And Mother Goose supposedly lived in Boston in the early 1700's and even knew Cotton Mather....!

If you have a chance, check out HEX on MotherGoose.com. You'll find it here: http://mothergoose.com/Leslie_Wilson_Art/hex/playHex.htm

Hinx, minx, the old witch winks,

The fat begins to fry,

Nobody at home but Jumping Joan,

Father, Mother, and I.

Stick, stock, stone dead,

Blind man can't see;

Every knave will have a slave,

You or I must be he.

Walt Disney - The Truth About Mother Goose (2/2) - 1957

2010-06-25T12:30:00.001-07:00

Walt Disney - The Truth About Mother Goose (1/2) - 1957

2010-06-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

Printed 1691. Earliest Evidence of American Mother Goose

2009-09-21T09:47:00.001-07:00

Wow! Check out this fascinating and extremely rare early-American book that contains a hand-written Mother Goose nursery rhyme.

The rhyme is written upside down, perhaps to counter Cotton Mather's religious rants!

Here is the rhyme fragment:

A man of word and not of deeds,
Is like a garden full of weeds.

Click here to visit RareBookBuyer.com to see photos of the book, the hand-written rhyme fragment, and to read some very interesting history of Mother Goose in Boston.

Pease Porridge Hot

2009-08-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

Pease porridge hot,
Pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot,
Nine days old.
Some like it hot,
Some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot,
Nine days old.

With all the news lately about the importance of maintaining a healthy diet, and the difficulty of affording nutritious food, I feel compelled to write about pea soup. I can't think of a more affordable, easy and healthy way to feed a large family or group or friends than to make a big pot of pea soup.

At it's simplest: peas, water, salt & pepper, you can feed a family of four for about $1.50 (one pound of peas will make a 2 quart pot of soup...or even larger if you add veggies and pasta). Soak the peas overnight and your porridge will be done in an hour or two. Place in a crock pot and let the peas simmer on low for warm soup that is ready when you get home from work.

Plain pea soup, however, might be a bit too bland for any but your youngest children. Sautee onions, celery and garlic, then add to your pot of peas as they simmer in water. Dice up a few carrots and a potato. Throw in a handful of pasta. If it's summer, toss in sliced yellow squash or zuccini. If it's winter, add shredded cabbage. The more veggies (and rice, pasta, and even meat) that you add to your pea soup, the more liquid you can add as well, and the more soup you will have to eat during the ensuing nine days.

Here is a great way to get savory tasting soup without adding meat or too much salt: when the peas are soft and the soup is nearly ready to serve, add 1 tablespoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, 1 teaspoon tumeric, 1 teaspoon ground cumin, and any other spice or herbs you like. Let simmer in pot for another 10 minutes, then serve. Waiting until the end to add salt and spices, helps the peas stay tender and keeps the spice and herb flavors from boiling off.

Just as affordable as split peas are all kinds of beans. "Pease Porridge" hot (or cold i.e., gazpacho or even dip!) is excellent and so are bean soups. Accompany with corn chips, muffins, toast or croutons for a filling, home-cooked meal.

And remember, for families on a busy schedule that need quick cooking meals, soak the peas or beans overnight before cooking. Make a lot of soup at once, then serve for a few days. The flavors just get better. Freeze any extra for a nearly instant meal at a later date.

Miss Humpty Dumpty-Gothic Mother Goose-Fairy Tale

2009-04-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

Miss Humpty Dumpty

Check out Pinky Toast art and dolls!

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5852&section_id=5002089

2008-12-13T08:08:00.000-08:00

I have just learned that Gertrude Stein was called "The Mother Goose of Montparnasse". I think the phrase was meant to demean her for her repetitive, rhyming and rhythmic writings. I also read that someone elaborated "The Mother Goose of Montparnasse, but with a brain", ouch!

Gertrude Stein was a truly experimental writer who exploded forms of poetry and narrative in a very freeing way. You can listen to Mother Goose of Montparnasse: Selections from the Writings of Gertrude Stein for free on Rhapsody.com.

Gertrude Stein's statue was the first public statue of a "real" woman to be installed in New York City. The only other female statue? The Mother Goose Statue in Central Park, placed there in 1938.

No, no my melodies will never die...A rose is a rose is a rose" !

Who Was Mother Goose?

2008-11-18T09:37:00.000-08:00

I find the quote from "Ma'am Goose" so fascinating. (see the first post below!) Were Mother Goose and William Shakespeare born at the same time? She says "...all imitators of my refreshing songs might as well write a new Billy Shakespeare as another Mother Goose--we two great poets were born together, and we shall go out of the world together."

Billy Shakespeare! She is so familiar with him that she casually uses that nickname "Billy," just like a peer. Could she have been his sister Joan? Or perhaps a fellow actor or playwrite or lover of rhyme and folk history and the english language? Or maybe this Ma'am Goose is another pen name for Shakespeare...his feminine, playful, parental side? What does she mean "we two great poets were born together, and we shall go out of the world together"?

I first found this quote at Project Gutenberg, a fantastic resource for transcribed versions of early literary works. The book is called "The Only True Mother Goose Melodies" and was published in Boston in 1843. A very informative introduction and history by the Reverand Edward Everett Hale, D. D. and a rather anonymous "correspondent, N.B.S.", includes the quote by Ma'am Goose. You can read the Introduction, History of the Goose Family, and 160 classic nursery rhymes by clicking here.

My favorite mystery connection between Shakespeare and an early American appearance of Mother Goose goes is alluded to in the History of the Goose Family. Reverand Hale describes the happy marriage of Elizabeth Goose to Thomas Fleet, a book publisher in Boston. (Fleet, by the way, published "Songs for the Nursery; or, Mother Goose's Melodies for Children" in 1719.) The Goose family, a very old and wealthy family from England, came to America in the 1650s. A female descendant of this family, Elizabeth Goose, is married to Fleet in 1715. The marriage ceremony is officiated by, ooh, shivers here....Cotton Mather. Cotton Mather was the Puritan minister whose sermons fanned the flames of witchcraft hysteria that resulted in the Salem Witch trials in that horrible winter of 1692. The good people of Boston were, of course, horrified upon the Spring thaw, to learn of the goings-on in Salem.

Why does Reverand Hale find it amusing, gossipy, and ironic that in 1715 Mather presided over the marriage ceremony of Thomas Fleet and Elizabeth Goose? Mather also wrote some horribly depressing morality tales for little children. Could it be that Hale is pleased the forces of happy, loving, rhyme, song and games survived the worst a Puritan minister could do?

Cotton Mather, by the way, reportedly owned a collection of Shakespeare's works, kept under lock and key, I'm sure. "Records suggest that the owner of the oldest folio edition of Shakespeare’s works in the colonies was the Reverend Cotton Mather, a staunch Puritan and renowned witch-hunter in the mid-17th century." Visit this interesting public artworks site "The Dreaming" to read more about Shakespeare in the American colonies.

Banned Books? Shakespeare's works "bowdlerized" and censored...read more here!

a Quote from the real, Real Mother Goose!

2008-11-13T16:22:00.000-08:00

HEAR WHAT MA'AM GOOSE SAYS!
My dear little Blossoms, there are now in this world, and always will be, a great many grannies besides myself, both in petticoats and pantaloons, some a deal younger to be sure; but all monstrous wise, and of my own family name.

These old women, who never had chick nor child of their own, but who always know how to bring up other people's children, will tell you with very long faces, that my enchanting, quieting, soothing volume, my all-sufficient anodyne for cross, peevish, won't-be-comforted little bairns, ought to be laid aside for more learned books, such as THEY could select and publish.

Fudge! I tell you that all their batterings can't deface my beauties, nor their wise pratings equal my wiser prattlings; and all imitators of my refreshing songs might as well write a new Billy Shakespeare as another Mother Goose--we two great poets were born together, and we shall go out of the world together.

No, no my Melodies will never die,

While nurses sing, or babies cry.