I am appalled at the vitriol aimed at the lovely Martha Stewart. She has enriched the American fabric with her ideas on creating the Home-Beautiful. A little too obsessive-compulsive, a little too lah-dee-dah, a little to "perfect" say the cynics. Not to me, IMO we should all strive for an aesthetic ideal in everything we do.

OK, maybe Martha did some shifty stock trading that saved her 200K but the resultant public ridicule has cost her hundreds of millions in lost value of the stock of her own corporation. Prosecute her for illegal trading if that's what it was. Don't stamp her gleefully into the ground.

Feminists, why do you not rally to the defense of this woman? This woman, who by talent, hard work, "male-model" take-no-prisoners entrepreneurship has created a hugely successful business that employs many and harms no one. She has bootstrapped herself from Polish-American working class origins to becoming one of the wealthiest, most influential women in America. She and Oprah have a lot in common.

I remember Martha when my HS played Nutley HS in football. She was a Nutley cheerleader. We'd walk over to their side of the field just to watch Martha do cartwheels. Those inner thighs, the compact butt, the home-made outfit, the motivating presence, the garland of dried flowers. She was the real-deal, no doubt about it.

What is it that makes us want to see successful people fail?

-- (lars@indy.net), June 25, 2002

Answers

Martha is sixty-five years old ...?

-- helen (stuffing@more.shit.under.the.bed), June 25, 2002.

"Those inner thighs, the compact butt,"

Now she has cottage cheese flabby thighs and a butt the size of a buffalo.

-- (too@much.snacking), June 25, 2002.

Helen--

I think Martha is 59 or 60. I was older than most kidz because of my 4 years in reform school.

-- (lars@indy.net), June 25, 2002.

When you have as much money as she does there is no reason to cheat. People who work with her say she is an anal-retentive, arrogant, hot-tempered, bossy primadonna. She never learned how to enjoy what life offers her even with enough money to have anything she wants, so the only thing which gives her satisfaction is her sense of power over other people and a disturbing notion that her "success" entitles her to have an advantage over others by cheating the system. Basically, she is mentally ill. I'm surprised that you would support such a seriously disturbed bitch like her Lars.

-- (burn in @ hell. martha), June 25, 2002.

Lars:

I seldom get to see the MS show. I remember one time that I did. I was at home preparing a meal for about 20 people. I had the TV on and there was Martha. She was talking about truffles.

She spent a short time with of a tour of the dealer in NYC who carried white truffles. Then she said "these" cost 5 or 6 hundred a pound [I don't remember; other that it wasn't something that I would rush out and buy a pound of;<))]. She showed us how to use them. This amounted to grating some on the top of a salad [a good thing]. She, then, spent most of the rest of the show telling us how to store the rest of our pound of white truffles. The very last part was how to weave a cover to protect our stored white truffles from light damage.

I thought it was very funny [like a SNL skit]. Of course it could have been the wine. ;<))))

Best Wishes,,,,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), June 25, 2002.

"Burn in"--

All my bitches are seriously disturbed.

Yes, I've heard the stories about her personality. So what? Why are folks so quick to bash her? She's a rags to riches success. Give her some credit. She didn't inherit it, she didn't marry it, she built a business. If she were a man, you wouldn't call her a bitch, you'd call her a tough/smart operator. (I'm talking about her own business, not the ImClone trade).

BTW, did you know Martha was a Clinton Democrat? I wonder if she did any commodity trading with Hillary?

Z--

Think I'll get in the truffles biz. Do you have morels on your property? Yum. How come morels can't be cultivated?

-- (lars@indy.net), June 25, 2002.

"Why are folks so quick to bash her?"

Maybe some of those folks are Imclone stockholders who got burned when the bitch sold her shares because she was in bed with the CEO (literally) and they weren't.

"If she were a man, you wouldn't call her a bitch, you'd call her a tough/smart operator."

No I wouldn't. I'd call her a greedy bastard or a corporate criminal just like I call all the other sleazeballs that do this kind of shit.

"did you know Martha was a Clinton Democrat?"

No, I didn't, but that explains why Dumbya told the SEC to probe her from the inside out. I don't make excuses for Democrats, a sleazy crooked piece of shit is a sleazy crooked piece of shit no matter what the politics. Did you know that the overwhelming majority are Pugs?

-- (you have low standards @ in. role models), June 26, 2002.

Her secretary did a linda tripp and said they had the insider info. She's a criminal. I don't care for her one way or the other. She made a million off teaching women how to 'stay at home', not really a feminist in my mind.

I'm all for people making it big in an honest way. If they lie, cheat, or steal, then they should be punished.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), June 26, 2002.

Lars:

Morels are grown commercially. You can even get kits to grow them in your yard. Here is one:

Morel Kit

I have a friend who is working on commercialization of truffles for our area. I get what is left over from the experiments. ;<)

Best Wishes,,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), June 26, 2002.

Z, that's cool. So how come morels still cost $32/lb at roadside stands in early spring? Or have they become cheaper? I wouldn't know.

Sounds like a new niche for ADM.

-- (lars@ibdy.net), June 26, 2002.

In Martha Stewart's Kitchen

The camera pans across the room

To see what she has made:

An omelette or a spring bouquet

Or just an inside trade.

-- (calvin trillin @ the.nation), June 26, 2002.

lars,

"What is it that makes us want to see successful people fail?"

Easy one {which of the seven deadlies is this?}: Envy.

In her case it's not a cut & dry wealth/power affliction though, because it's all mixed up with the home & hearth longings/frustrations.

Maria nailed the feminist viewpoint - ie: the back to the kitchen mixed meassage. I bet you already knew this though, you ol' fem- baiter, you.

Salon ran a piece on her awhile ago that I bet you'll get a kick out of:

http://www.salon.com/bc/1999/02/cov_16bc.html

Z,

Care to field the same cultivation question with regards to Boletus edulis/porcini & chanterelles?

-- flora (***@__._), June 26, 2002.

Martha Stewart does lunch with Bill Clinton

-- (Lizzie Grubman @ The.Hamptons), June 26, 2002.

"Feminists, why do you not rally to the defense of this woman?"

You must be joking right? Staying home playing the dumb broad baking cookies and ironing is doesn't do a damn thing toward proving to men that we are equal or better than them. All this dumb broad has done is prove that you can be hugely successful by playing along with the barefoot and pregnant housewife role that you chauvinists like to force us into. She is a whore of brainlessness, willing to sell out her own integrity in the name of the almighty dollar.

-- Helen Reddy (hear@me.roar), June 26, 2002.

Flora:

Care to field the same cultivation question with regards to Boletus edulis/porcini & chanterelles?

I use them both but don't know much about commercial cultivation. I know that there was a project in New Zealand to cultivate them as a value added crop in tree nurseries. They have a site:

porcini

I haven't talked to them in a while so I don't know much about their progress There was a project in the last half of the 90's to work out procedures for commercial production of golden chanterelles in Sweden. I haven't heard if they were sucessful. These are common where I live.

I would guess that production of either, if it is occuring, is on a small scale at the moment.

Best Wishes,,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), June 26, 2002.

Thanks Z. As far I as I know, I think they still pretty much depend on the right habitat & amount of Pixie dust. Same with the Matsutakes.

Lars & Helen,

You're going to love this: after reviewing that Salon article, the reference to her stint as a Wall Street stock broker stuck out like a sore thumb. How can she claim ignorance of such a conflict of interest? My current opinion, speaking as a Domestic Goddess, is that I thought that Martha had better Manners! With folks losing their net worth, as we watch the dollar plummet and the price of milk rise - well, it's as if I invited her for tea & she swiped a piece of my Grandmother's sterling.

-- flora (***@__._), June 26, 2002.

But can I grow them under my sink?

-- (lars@indy.net), June 26, 2002.

Only if they do not clash with the rest of your decor.

-- flora (***@__._), June 26, 2002.

Worried about the ever-growing stash of unacceptable items under her bed, she carefully works her cookie cutters behind the resume...

-- helen (my@life.is.despised), June 26, 2002.

The trouble with Martha Sewart is easy to understand.

Folks have been hurt in their IRAs and 401s by soft stocks.

Enron. Ken Lay and his cohorts pissed off a lot of people.

She has made a name for herself by doing everything "perfectly", thus presenting herself (by default) as "better" than those of us who don't do everything perfectly. A built in "un-likeablilty factor" right there.

But mostly, while Americans love an underdog (which Martha no longer is) we also love to see the mighty fall. Martha screwed up in a way that folks were already pissed off about, she did a questionable stock deal in a time when such things strike a painful nerve in the American psyche. Very bad timing.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeeD@yahoo.com), June 26, 2002.

In the early days, Martha was my favorite. So tasteful, so casually gracious, so nuanced, so aware of the symetry of les objets. Most importantly, only certain special types of people knew of her. She had the good taste to not be common. She was our person.

Gradually, success ruined her. No longer was she unique to the persons of the Upper East Side, the Hamptons, Scarsdale and Greenwich. She became a common celeb. She had a TV show, a magazine and a (gag) corporation. She became a brand. The final insult was KMart. Pottery Barn, Crate n Barrel, even Bed, Bath and Beyond might have been OK. But KMart?! No way! Tacky, Martha. Tacky, tacky, tacky!

Everything changed, at an accelerating pace. We all could feel it. Martha had sold out. Mammon was her God, not tastiness. Soon the late night TV comics mocked her. "Martha Stewart" jokes flooded the Internet. Having her products in view became an embarrassment, not a status symbol.

Even her appearance changed. The once lovely gamine, mischievous face thickened. I became increasingly aware of her lower class Polack origins. It became easy to imagine her in a babushka and shawl, drinking vodka, eating kielbasa, sweeping the streets of a gray and grim Gdansk.

Briefly, Martha you are no longer "in". Byeee.

-- (Edwina Tastee @ NPR.com), June 26, 2002.

You, Edwina, are a disgusting snob

-- (give me@break.), June 26, 2002.

Yes, isn't it grand?

-- (Edwina Tastee @ get thee to a.snobbery), June 26, 2002.