We made pizza for dinner Sunday tonight. We had fresh sweet peppers and eggplant from our farm friends to put on it.

Mabel and I debated how best to handle the eggplant. We didn’t want to add too much oil to the enterprise—olive oil already infused the sauce. So I proposed slicing the plant thinly and baking it in a pan coated with cooking spray.

This worked fine, with soft and juicy results. Until it was revealed that Mabel was hoping for “crispy” eggplant. We could have cooked the eggplant endlessly until it got all dried out, but we arrived at a better plan: breading. We simply poured bread crumbs into the pan. The soft eggplant sopped up the crumbs neatly, and before long had achieved the requisite crispiness.

We prepared four pizzas, a variety of ways. One of the eggplant ones was on a cast iron pan with a thin crust and conventional pizza sauce and mozz. The more artisanal one was on a pizza stone, with crushed fresh juicy tomatoes, the eggplant, and a thicker coating of mozzarella.

This is the pizza dough recipe I swear by, slightly revised from Linda McCartney’s World of Vegetarian Cooking, which was given to me as a gift  over a decade ago by former New Haven Advocate colleague Hank Hoffman:

1 cup hot water

2 teaspoons yeast

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon sugar

1 ½ cups white flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

and a little salt.

You stir everything but the flour together, then add the flour. Knead it until transforms from doughy to sticky. Cover and let rise for an hour. Divide into parts —three parts if you have large round pizza pans, four or more parts if you’re using smaller pans or cookie sheets. At this point, preheat the oven to as high as your oven will go—500 degrees is great. Cover a table with flour, roll out the dough, cover it with sauce then cheese then toppings, bake for 15-20 minutes and succumb.

Living in New Haven, I naturally aspire to thin crust pizza. I don’t get bent out of shape about it—I simply roll the dough as thin as I possibly can, get the rest of the stuff on top of it before it can rise again, and hope for the thinnest.

You do know there’s a primary election August 14, right? That’s Tuesday, across the state. Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

In both the Democratic and Republican primaries for U.S. Senator from Connecticut, it’s a woman versus a man, and in both cases the man is called Chris. Chris Murphy, currently a Congressman, now wants to be a Senator; he’s running againt Susan Bysiewicz, who was once Secretary of the State of Connecticut and before this wanted to be Attorney General.

Republican-wise, it’s Chris Shays, a Connecticut congressman from 1987-2008, now running for the Senate. His primary opponent is Linda McMahon, who has never held office and ran unsuccessfully for Senate a couple of years ago.

The guy who’s held this Senate seat for a while, Joe Lieberman, ain’t running. The Democrat and Republican candidates who win Tuesday will campaign against each other until November.

I’m outside Troup School in New Haven today, meeting neighbors in my role of co-chair of the Democratic Town Committee for Ward 2. Not a lot of voting going on, to be sure, and it looks like rain.

The past week of my stuff at www.dailynutmeg.com

My story on the WAVE Gallery boutique is here.

My story on C.J. May, the green magician, is here.

My Week in New Haven highlights column for July 30 is here.

I have a little money saved up but I’m not telling anyone.

We’ve all witnessed what we swear must be “the longest drum solo in the history of the world.” But what about the bass?

“Bassy” (pronounced “Basie”) Biggs, who’s equally proficient on the stand-up acoustic, standard electric and modernistic stick varieties of the four-string instrument, held forth for seven hours Saturday at a downtown cathedral.

Occasionally a guest star would stride up and plug in a guitar, but mostly it was just basic Bassy. He allowed himself one five-minute break per hour, and he even covered those with tape loops of himself so that the music itself never actually stopped.

He went on and on, bumbumbumbumbum, deeming the daylong stint “no big deal. I’ve definitely had rehearsal days which were longer.”

The audience for this barely advertised endurance exposition was sparse, until the last hour when a group of well-wishers from the Bullfinch piled into the pews to chant “Bass-y! Bass-y! Bass-y!” Which inspired a whole range of fresh improvisations and a furious finale.

Biggs promises another round in future, with the same ground rule—no drums.

Dammit Tig, R.O.T.V. and Blame It on Cain at the Bullfinch. Don’t expect them to start playing until after midnight… Private party at Hamilton’s, and D’ollaire’s is dark. The evil bands win!

My children are now of an age where the use of the word “bum” in a pop song does not immediately elicit hoots of inappropriate laughter. But it helps.

1. “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” by Harry McClintock. The quintessential hobo anthem, a Depression-era classic that provides snappy answers to stupid questions such as “Why don’t you work as other men do?”

2. “Hallelujah I’m a Bum Again by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. A completely different song than the one above, much more melodic and lyrical and rather less funny and scruffy too. Popularized by Al Jolson in the 1933 film Hallelujah I’m a Bum, directed by Lewis Milestone from a script by Ben Hecht and S.N. Behrman.

3. “The Bumblebee Tuna Song,” by Mephiskapheles. The catchy TV commercial was turned into an even more potent ska dance tune by a band which frequently visited New Haven’s Tune Inn club.

4. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Some might say it goes “Duh Duh Duh Dum,” but truly it’s “Bum Bum Bum Bum.”

5. The Dragnet Theme. The only constant for every rendition of this classic police procedural, whether on radio, TV, TV again, the Dan Ayckroyd/Tom Hanks comedy, or TV again.

6. “I’m Just an Old Son of a Bum.” Obscure 1930s sheet music. A comic hobo ditty with umpteen verses, one of which goes:

A college fellow asked me once

If I had gone to Yale

I said “Could you repeat that please

Did you say ‘Yale’ or ‘jail’?!

I’m just an old son of a bum.

Just an old son of a bum.

Just an old son of a, just an old son of a,

Just an old son of a bum.

7. “Son of a Bum,” Mel Tillis. Again, unrelated to the song of virtually the same title above.

8. “The Bum Bum Song,” Tom Green. Aka “The Lonely Swedish,” this is the first bum song on this list to be about a rump, a posterior, a bottom. It was an extraordinarily popular song, with millions of (free) downloads, a #1 placement on MTV’s Total Request Live show in 1999, and a reference on Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.”

9. “The Bum Bum Song,” Blink-182. Again, no the same as the one above. But also about an ass. And even ruder, if such a thing is possible. Homophobic too.

10. “The Beach Bum Song,” Bright Eyes. A token indie tune for the bum list.   Doesn’t use the word “bum” in the lyrics at all, just in the title. The main image is of a “postman sleeping in the sand.”

This week’s www.ct.com action:

My review of Tartuffe at Westport Country Playhouse is here.

My review of the Mission of Burma album Unsound is here.

My Gore Vidal obituary is here.

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/chris/Desktop/Scribblers.doc

My follow-up story on the Replacements documentary screening and cover-band show at Café Nine July 27 is here.

Turns out the housemates with rich parents either aren’t as rich as we were led to believe or are being “taught a lesson.”

The Shore Lobsters, the trio which originally formed to play post-game shindigs at the flying-disc tournaments in which the band’s founders members hurled and spun, added a slew of new members for a special gig last month.

The line-up included two more guitarists, a keyboardist, two harmonica players, a ukulele strummer, two tambourine virtuosi and assorted roadies.

As of Tuesday, the band had reverted to its initial threesome. “Musical differences” are being cited for the split.

It was a ruse, actually. The flying disc team had been invited to an international tourney but couldn’t afford the plane fare. So they strung together a slew of small grants, donations and bequests so that they could make their match.

The band formed (or rather reformed, perhaps you could say deformed) under an arts enrichment grant bestowed by the Ethnomusicology of the college on the hill where most of the sportsmen-cum-musicians purport to study. The institution was fully aware of the impromptu, second-priority nature of the ensemble it was funding, but saw promise nonetheless and set a few conditions. The disc tossers all had to attend a special class on music appreciation as well as three supervised rehearsals. They had to learn a composition by a student composer (luckily, one which favors primitive and repetitive neo-classical concepts in her work) and promise to perform it while they were at the tournament, to an audience of at least 20 people. And they had to submit a group report on this rare musical voyage.

All conditions were met, especially the concert one. When the organizers of the tournament, on the small tropical island of Wam Hau, caught wind of the intriguing travel fund, they formally invited the ShoreLobs to perform at the event’s opening ceremonies, before an audience of thousands. The coup is thought to be the largest crowd ever assembled for a debut performance of a student composition in the college’s history. The student in question, Jean Bluté, responds to the honor with this challenge: “If they let us perform during the school football games, we could beat that record right away.”

The traveling-music scheme is unlikely to be repeated, but the Shore Lobsters’ performance of “Disc Variations” has been recorded for posterity. None of the new members of the band have any interest in officially joining the musical wing of the sports team. (Only in the rarefied world of disc-flinging could membership in a jam band be considered “too much work”). But expect to see them jumping up at post-game jams when the mood (or several beers) strikes, now that they know a few tambourine licks.

The Pizzings and Tumblefun special summer series concert at the Cranberry Building. Attend, but don’t let it get out of hand. We want more of these…. The Fieldstons, Kolor Syndicate and Jackansons at the Bullfinch, power pop. No, we’re being generous. These are straightahead rock bands… Mane Focus, Lumin8 and Rex Hame & the Situates bleed covers at Hamilton’s… Acorn Cans and Old Salt Barber Shop at D’ollaire’s. We’re delighted that these bands have settled back down to where they’re within reach of their most attentive fans…

Are the Red Sox dead? Even Minnesota has been beating them.

But never say never. The Red Sox know from miracles and mysteries. The corpses have been piling up for years in novels set at Fenway.

Here are ten morbid fictions where red is not just the color of sox. The ones I’ve actually read, I’ve commented upon. The others I hope to get to in the post-season, since I’m unlikely to be listening to ballgames then.

1. Murder at Fenway Park by Troy Soos. Set in 1912.

2. Killing the Curse by Jeff Stratton

3. Green Monster by Rick Shefchik.

4. Dirty Water: A Red Sox Mystery By Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and Jere Smith.

Connecticut-based novelist and memoirist Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and her son Jere, both diehard Red Sox fans, concocted this thriller where the ballpark is more than a backdrop for murder. The story is packed with team trivia and shows serious love for the Sox.

5. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King. The only book on this list to be adapted as a pop-up book, King’s touching and harrowing adventure of a young girl lost in the woods is informed by a universal symbol of social connectedness—listening to a ball game on the radio.

6. Fear in Fenway by Crabbe Evers. The cover of this murder mystery, part of a whole baseball-themed series, features a skeleton sitting, grinning spectrally, in the stands. Not an uncommon sight around the seventh inning of many games, to be sure. The story isn’t as horrorstruck as that cover suggests, and the best parts of it are really the baseball-history bits.

7. Best Bet in Beantown, Squeeze Play in Beantown, Foul Ball in Beantown and Double Play in Beantown; Will Beaman mysteries by G.S. Rowe

8. Harvey Blissberg mysteries by Richard Rosen.

9. Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker. Casual Red Sox references are plentiful in Parker’s Spenser series. This one actually has a character who pitches for the team.

10. Strike Three, You’re Dead by Richard Rosen. Actually, protagonist Harvey Blissberg is a FORMER Red Sox player; in this novel’s he’s helping out the Providence Jewels.