Welcome to a potpourri of fun! On this page you’ll find the latest comics by Jari Thymian, a motivational quote, a crossword puzzle contest, and whatever else we decide to throw in here. Be sure to check back for the latest!

• Earth Corner – With Pat Walsh
• Every Day Should be Earth Day – Editorial by Laura Brewer
• Madi’s Kitchen
• Mixed Bag – Comics by Jari
• Fun with Vixie
• Quotes & Riddles

Quotes & Riddles

Riddle Answer

Mixed Bag – This week’s Comic by Jari

To see all of the previous comics by Jari visit the Mixed Bag – Comics by Jari page.

May 12, 2024 – Wings Out – Advice from a Mother Turkey Vulture

Earth Corner – With Pat Walsh

Where are the Bees?

Posted May 5, 2024

When she talks about her apple tree loaded with fragrant blossoms this spring, master gardener Joelyn Pafford looks sad. Pafford, a retired Raton school teacher, keeps asking herself this question: where are the bees?

Indeed.

When I checked out our backyard plum tree, I found pretty pink blooms posing for their pollinating partners, like invitations to a party. The flowers were vacant.

Unless bees, wasps and other insects start showing up, my friend Joelyn may have no apples, and I may have no plums. Fruit tree flowers offer nectar to insects in exchange for the critters moving pollen from the male flower parts to the female.

Aside from possibly no fruit, I just miss these tiny creatures. Years ago, I stood mesmerized under my singing Granny Smith apple tree in Longmont, Colorado. The tree “sang” to me via a choir of hundreds (thousands?) of honey bees foraging and buzzing in the flowers.

Honey bees are non-native insects brought to North America by settlers eager to harvest honey and wax. We have beekeepers in the Raton area. There are also nearly 4,000 different native bees, including bumble bees, who handled pollinator chores long before the honey bees arrived.

Neither Joelyn nor I are seeing bees of either variety.

More and more people are aware of the critical role played by pollinators, which help produce much of our food. Meanwhile, scientists report that insect populations are shrinking worldwide—what some call the Insect Apocalypse.

“… insect surveys suggest that 40 percent or more of insect species may be under threat of extinction … due to habitat loss, increased use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and the changing climate,” writes entomologist Jason Cryan, head of the Utah Natural History Museum.

In the 1950s and 1960s, I sat in the backseat of our black Chevy as my Army officer father drove Mom and I to his next assignment. Like others of my generation, I remember bug-splattered windshields that required frequent cleaning stops. On my road trips now, the bug-windshield encounters are much fewer.

Also, missing insects are bad news for birds. Parent birds need to catch thousands of insects to feed their baby birds in the spring. Audubon cites reports that estimate it takes between 6,000 to 9,000 insect caterpillars to raise a brood of five chickadees.

I don’t know what’s happening locally. Are Raton-area beekeepers seeing a die-off? Did warmer weather cause trees to flower before native bugs could hatch out? Have drier conditions made it harder for insects to reproduce?  

Meanwhile, here are a few suggestions. We can:

•               plant drought-tolerant native plants that support native bees
•   call Raton city hall and “opt out” of pesticide spraying to mitigate mosquitoes
•     put out simple habitats for native, non-stinging bees like mason bees (i.e. open-ended tin cans with sticks—see patterns online)

While some of us dislike bugs, the truth is that if insects disappeared tomorrow, our lives would be hugely impacted. They are the bees’ knees!

Madi’s Kitchen

Madi’s Kitchen is a delightful addition to our Potpourri page. Each week our young chef will provide a recipe that she has developed that has been tested on her friends and family. Read Madi’s Bio on the About Us page.

Posted May 12, 2024

Chicken and Dumpling Soup

Egg drop noodles:

• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon  salt 
• 1 teaspoon paprika or red Chile
• 3/4 cup flour 
• As much water as needed 

Instructions 

1. Add your whole chicken, minus its guts unless you like them, to a crock pot and add your herbs and salt to taste. Cover with water. Cook low and slow until the meat is falling off the bones. This may take up to 8 hours, but can be done ahead of time! 
2. Remove the chicken from the bones; discard the bones. (Save the wishbone for a wish!)
3. Add the chicken, onion, garlic, celery, carrots, potatoes, squash, beans and bay leaf, salt, pepper plus the reserved chicken stock to a stove pot.
4. Give it all a good mix then place the lid on and cook for approximately an hour on high, until all the veggies are tender. 
5. For dumplings, in a separate bowl mix the dry ingredients: flour, salt, chili power/paprika.
6. Add egg and water until the mixture is waffle batter consistency.
7. Drop this mixture into the boiling soup pot one spoonful at a time.
8. Cook another 5-10 minutes until the dumplings are puffy and firm.
9. Serve in a bowl with a slice of nice warm sourdough and a salad!  

Chicken noodle soup is one of my favorite food to eat in winter, but you don’t have to wait till it’s snowing outside to have this recipe! My mom hasn’t been feeling well and chicken noodle soup is definitely a good way to tell her happy Mother’s Day, too! And is there a better way to eat the soup than a salad to go with it? As a bonus, there’s a recipe for Greek Salad also! 

As for the chicken! People have been eating chicken according to the historical record for at least 6000 to 7000 years—which is a long time to come up with recipes! One of the most popular cookbooks of the 18th century, Hannah Glass’s, “The art of cookery made plain and easy,” had many chicken recipes. She began writing it to make some cash, since she and her husband were poor, but it was a complicated endeavor because there were no standard measures yet. She went out of the way to write her book for common people, with common words so everyone could understand it. That might’ve been why it was so popular! While her book isn’t nearly as popular today, another big name classic in the world of chicken, Campbell’s—Joseph Campbell and his famous soup!—certainly is, even after 150 years. 

Joseph Campbell went into business with Abraham Anderson, forming Anderson and Campbell. They started out with tinned vegetables and mincemeat. I’m not an expert, but I think that’s pretty far away from soup! Campbell brought up Anderson’s portion of the company in 1876, and his new partner Arthur Dorrance was a business man who saw the value of products with long shelf life. Soon they were more known for their canned beef steak and tomato ketchup. Another shift came in 1889, when they changed their name again to the Joseph Campbell Preservative Company—a really long name. Soon after, Campbell stepped down as president. Now Dorrance took over, and finally in 1895 they released their first can of soup! 

Campbell’s started getting closer to the company we all know today, with a very popular beef steak tomato soup. It was so popular with restaurants in fact that they had to send enormous 36 ounce cans of soup—more than two pounds at a time! It was heavy and expensive to ship. John Dorrance solved this problem and changed the future of soup. He had his chemistry department working to condense tomato soup, just like condensed milk. And in 1898 he succeeded. Figuring out how to remove the water from the company’s tomato soup, he created the first marketable condensed soup. The company soon capitalized on the idea, since it took less aluminum to make smaller cans that people then added their own water to. The first lineup of condensed soups included steak tomato soup, vegetable soup, chicken and oxtail soups. The soups were an instant success! The design of the soup cans was changed to the iconic red and white. 

In 1930, Campbell’s released the first radio ads, including their now famous “Mmmm, mmm good!” Jingle. In 1934, their advertising department recorded an ad for their “noodles with chicken soup”. Noodles with Chicken soup?? Does that sound familiar? Well, the voice actor for the ad accidentally scrambled his lines and said “Chicken Noodle Soup,” and orders began to pour in from across the country for Campbell’s chicken noodle soup! They ultimately just altered the name of their product, since that’s what everyone wanted!

By the Second World War, Campbell’s was a household institution with over 1 million cookbooks in print. But their fame was still growing! In 1962, pop artist Andy Warhol premiered his “32 Campbell’s soup cans” paintings in Los Angeles as a tribute to his mother. His family, Czech immigrants who mined coal in Pennsylvania, only had Campbell’s soup as a luxury during the Great Depression when Warhol was a child, and the decadence of the sixties—with soup on every shelf!—influenced his art greatly. The premiere itself was not very big, and only six of the paintings were bought at that time—one of them by Dennis Hopper! But still, it shook the foundations of the art world, bringing about arguments about what constituted art, and whether the soup can counted! The humble soup can was forever etched into pop history from that moment forward. 

By the turn of the 20th century, people began to watch how much salt they were eating, and more and more turned away from Campbell’s high sodium soups entirely. Campbell’s signed onto the sodium reduction policy, cutting the amount of salt from their projects by as much as 45%. However, after funding some scientific studies looking at the relation between sodium and hypertension, the company reversed again and put all the salt back in the soup! They were on unsteady ground still, and by 2019 Campbell’s had huge amounts of debt and was on the brink of collapse. All that changed in 2020 however, when people began to stock up on the iconic cans as a quick and easy staple—but salt discussion aside, I really do like this soup better than the canned! It makes over a gallon of soup at a time, which is plenty to freeze for later or share with a neighbor. You can customize it with whatever veggies you have on hand. Plus it is extra hearty because of the homemade dumplings, which my nana learned how to make from her nana!

So this Mother’s Day, from my nana’s nana to her to me, and from me to you, I hope you enjoy some hearty chicken and dumpling noodle soup! 

Fun with Vixie

Published April 14, 2024

My Experiences with Film Prize Jr.

By Vixie Zorra

Last 4th of July, I learned about El Raton Media Works’ Film Prize Jr., which is an annual competition where kids in middle and high school across the state write, storyboard, and direct their own films. On April 5, 6, and 7, there was be a Red Carpet in Albuquerque where all of the students’ films was be showcased and shown live on YouTube. There were a variety of film mediums, including live-action, stop-motion, and animation. The films are usually about 5-10 minutes with a full character and story arc.

Wanting to become a filmmaker someday, I was ecstatic to join what was, I thought, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It took some trial and error before I decided what film I wanted to make. It switched between doing a film about a girl going through domestic abuse to a futuristic, cyberpunk film before settling on a storyline I loved about a boy (who was secretly the Phoenix reincarnated) who was chased out of his Utah home and found by the United States military. Looking back, I am SOOO glad I didn’t go through with it. We were all exhausted when we filmed a much simpler film in one day, that we couldn’t even imagine what War of the Phoenix would’ve been like. That, and the fact that Phoenix was becoming less and less like the storyline that I had loved so much.

Out of the whole thing, I would say that the hardest part for me was the storyboarding. I never realized until I was trying to do it that I couldn’t figure out what I wanted. I feel that I was too indecisive when it came to how I wanted the camera shots, where I wanted the characters to look, and how I could do it well without showing any violence or stunts. Other than that, I had a blast being in front of the camera and filming Doubt Defiers, a simpler film that shows two young girls trying to make their dreams come true despite no one believing in them. I would highly recommend the Film Prize to any young person out there interested in filmmaking.

The Doubt Defiers film was entered into the 2024 NM Film Prize Junior Film Festival held Friday, April 6, 2024. The awards ceremony was held Saturday, April 7, 2024. I’ll provide more information on my experience in future editions of Fun with Vixie!

Photos courtesy Ann Theis, El Raton Media Works

Riddle Answer – White. The house is built on the North Pole so the bear is a polar bear