Still more fun in the kitchen

I would like to hear about the one egg omelet though.  The Rye Krisp sounds intriguing, but the one egg sounds awfully parsimonious.

Parsimonious?  Are you saying cheap or stingy?  Some of us might make reference to elegant simplicity, but never mind.  Nothing I like better than a big-ass country breakfast with pancakes, biscuits & gravy, eggs, bacon, sausage too, why not?, hash browns, orange juice, grits, and keep that coffee coming, Honey, before I head off to the plant, or the fields, or the shop, or the barn, or that big pile of shit I gotta move over there.  Getting tired just thinking about it but waitaminute!  I'm not doing any of that honest work, I'm just another geezer not doing much of anything in the way of breaking a sweat so a meal like that is overkill and a cardiologist would emphasize kill.  Time to rethink the process, focus on quality and not quantity, and this is something that I've come up with.  By quality I'm talking about the ridiculously expensive Irish butter and those free-range organic eggs with the orange yolks.  I've convinced myself that I can taste the difference and they sure are purty settin' on the table.

One egg, one sausage patty crumbled up and well cooked, onion, cheddar cheese, an English muffin or Ry-Krisp with some cream cheese, maybe.  Or use a strip of bacon, whatever you like.  Depending on your technique, or lack of same, results will vary.  My method yields a fluffy, but structurally weak, omelette that is difficult to fold or maybe I have too much "stuffing;" still working on it.  I like the omelette cut in half with each half on a piece of the Ry-Krisp, or Wasa Brod, in this case.  The combination of flavors and textures makes my mouth and tongue do a happy dance and I feel satiated but not bloated.  A lot of work, time consuming, plenty of dirty dishes and utensils and skills that I have yet to master but I don't care.  Fun is where I'm finding it.

And please note my hoity-toity cloth napkin instead of paper.  Or, more properly, red shop rag from AutoZone, very soft and absorbent and very cheap but you have to wash them first to get the excess red dye out of the fabric.  2" hose clamps make dandy napkin rings if you want to get fancy and we all have some of those laying around, or we should; never know when you'll need some hose clamps, am I right?  The orange is a weird navel orange I got from Trader Joe's because I liked the bag design.  Very tasty, though.  The last image is a variant with the cheddar cheese on top of the egg, sitting on an English muffin with a little mayo; good but lacking the satisfying crunch of the flat bread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I have always liked cornbread.

Then you should try baking some.  What you've been making are corn muffins, big difference to those who know.  And none of that box mix nonsense either; find a good recipe, enter the world of cast iron and run with the big dogs.  Arf!  Arf!

 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 The Lake Isle of Innisfree

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

This would have been in my sophomore year in some classroom in one of those red brick buildings that lined the quad, some dusty dead classroom.  They all seemed dusty, slow, boring.  Poetry, I never liked it much.  It was dusty too, dusty and arid and why were they making us learn this?  Eventually there would have to be a paper.  I hated writing papers.  I preferred tests.  You show up in a room and there are some questions on a paper and you answer them as best you can and you pass or fail, but in any case you are done with it.  But a paper, it's not done until you actually sit down and write it.

But I had to admit that this was sterner stuff than what went down in Mrs Stark's English class.  There was this wild one about a patient etherized on a table, and there was William Butler Yeats, a grey paperback terribly dog-eared now and aching to break loose of its spine and spread its leaves far and wide, still sitting across the room on my bookshelf.  

Kind of an odd guy, had some weird theory about how the world suffers some cataclysmic event every couple thousand years.  Had a wife who went under spells and spoke some arcane truths.  Was a firebrand for the Irish cause, writing of Fairies and Fenians while men died for a cause greater than them.

Had a way with words though.  I think he was writing about the early industrial revolution and its pavements grey while he longed for peace and quiet away from the strife, which makes you wonder why he was so passionate about the cause, but he is a poet, he can write whatever he wants.

I feel it in my deep heart's core was the line that got to me (though bee loud glade is no slouch), the way I felt bored and lonely in those dusty dead classrooms.  Not that I then, or ever in my life, have been a nature guy, but you know, I wanted to be somewhere else.

For a battered old paperback on the bottom shelf it comes into my mind fairly often.  It came to mind with Beagles' being tired of Ukraine and of covid and Old Dog with no radio, hardly any tv, and minimal computer time, reading about a faraway small town where evenings are likely full of the linnet's wings, and tending to his own bee-loud glade.

I would like to hear about the one egg omelet though.  The Rye Krisp sounds intriguing, but the one egg sounds awfully parsimonious. 

muffin tins

 I have always liked cornbread.  Well who wouldn't?  Always a friendly sidekick to whatever is on the main plate, bright yellow, preferably piping hot,  but even warm will do just fine, and soft to the bite, melting into a celestial joy and announcing corn is here, corn the blessing of the American gods is filling your mouth.

Something like that.  And then when I moved to Austin and met jalapeno corn bread, oh happy day.

Corn has always fascinated me, that green gold sea on either side of the road driving down to Champaign and driving up from it, and on all those beautiful murals in Pilsen.

I did maybe a couple dozen of paintings of corn so when I was thinking of what to feed my admirers at my show corn muffins, smaller bite-sized bits of corn bread, sprang to mind

Didn't have no muffin tins at the time.  Well who needs them?.  I just spooned the dough into their little paper things on a disposable baking tins, and shoved them into the seldom-used oven and fifteen minutes later, golden brown, a miracle.

I thought they were quite tasty, and so did my friends, or maybe that is just what they said to be nice, but many of them were eaten and there were no reports of anybody being rushed to the hospital.

But they looked like shit.  They lumbered in that thin muffin paper and came out gnarly, looking a lot like what I sieved out of the catbox.

My sister gave me a proper muffin tin and that made all the difference in the world, they looked fine in the oven, and seeing them standing up straight and at attention rather than like the mob at some rowdy bar at closing time, I could better judge their color and fewer of them came out with what I liked to think of as a fetching patch of dark brown, though not all shared that opinion,

But those muffin papers.  They were hard to come by, sometimes they were there by the cornbread fixings and sometimes they just weren't and nobody seemed to care if or when they would ever be back again.

And then I remembered all of these commercials I must have seen without paying attention to them at the time.  Pam.  Had a sort of girlfriend named Pam long ago who knew how to fly an airplane but that kind of a girlfriend relationship didn't last long enough that I was able to ride in her passenger seat.  But here I speak of that spray.  From what little I remembered of those commercials you just sprayed it on the tin and spooned in the muffin stuff and stuffed it into the oven and sis boom bah, there was a muffin tin that you just had to give a light doink to and out sprang the muffins.

So that's what I will be serving up early June if all goes well, along with chips and salsa, and a bunch of stuff from the five dollar sweet nothings table just in front of the cash register at the Jewel.  

Eight of the paintings will be of bugs, from the dreaded murder hornet to the hated stinkbug, and the eight others will mostly be reworking stuff from my archive.  Just a short amble from the Geezer Chateau.  A much longer trek from America's new sweetheart town, but there will be photos.

And now I have to get to the next to the last painting for that show.

Clarence The Weasel

 When Clarence was my supervisor at the old paper mill, it was often said of him that he could fall into a vat full of shit and come out smelling like a rose.  What that means is he was always able to weasel out of the consequences of his bad decisions.  I suppose he made some good decisions as well, but for some reason, I don't seem to remember any of them.  It's hard for me to be objective about Clarence, since he refused to hire me back after he re-opened the mill under a new name, but to be fair, he did a lot of good for the town by keeping the mill open all those years, almost as long as Procter & Gamble had done before him.  Now this new owner promises to expand the operation, which would be nice if they really do it, only time will tell. 

I suppose that Cheboygan has its share of backroom dealings, all I know about any of them is what I read in our local paper.  I can see why a company would want to hold its cards pretty close to its chest, so it won't look so bad if the deal falls through.  Other times, though, there are big promises publicly made that never come to pass, like the last time Clarence announced that he was going to sell the mill.  He was in some kind of trouble with the DNR over a water pollution issue and had criminal charges filed against him.  He claimed that he had a buyer lined up, but they were reluctant to close the deal with those charges hanging over Clarence's head.  The DNR dropped the charges so that the deal could go through for the good of the town, but the buyer backed out anyway.  They said that they couldn't get financing because there was a banking crisis in the land, which eventually led up to the Great Recession of '09.  Our local banks, however, claimed that they were unaffected by the crisis.  One of them even had a big billboard on the edge of town that read, "We have millions to lend. Come get your share!"

It looks like the war in Ukraine is going to drag on forever, just like COVID.  After the Russians got their asses kicked trying to take Kyiv, I had hopes that it would wind up sooner rather than later, but it was not to be.  I never thought that the Berlin Wall would come down in my lifetime, but it did.  Of course, I had more lifetime left in those days than I do now, but you never know about things like that.

The Old Dog smells something fishier

Another beautiful day yesterday, a perfect time to check out the rummage sale at the local VFW as many of us city folk are wont to do.  While checking out the goods I spied a dandy pair of muffin tins, in almost perfect condition, for the princely sum of $1.  We can always use more muffin tins, right guys?  The perfect thing for sorting small nuts, bolts, screws, and whatnot.  Useful for muffins, too, if that's your thing.

Anyhow, I get them home and compare them to the tins I have and it looks like they are pretty much the same, looking like they came out of the same stamping plant.  Three tins, from three different companies, looking like they were all made at the same time.  All steel, and except for minor cosmetic flourishes and through-holes they are the same.  The shiny silver tin is the new one; you can tell I've had the others for some time.  They fit and nest together perfectly, so I'm thinking, in addition to the scandal of the plastic lids is there also a conspiracy among muffin tin manufacturers?  Do we now have to contend with Big Muffin Tin?  All I can say now is keep your powder dry.  A vacuum sealer is perfect for that sort of thing by the way.

 

 

The wheel turns

I've been in the same boat as Mr. Beagles regarding events in the news and I've got a solution that works for me.  I just don't watch or follow it much any more.  The last couple of weeks I've been busy here at the Geezer Chateau slowly getting things in order, adding a little color to the walls, and fooling around with new experiments and new ways to waste time.  The only paper I've been reading is the Trib, the Cheboygan Tribune, of course.  The online version is fine and slows me down some as I read about normal folks for a change.  Sure, I don't know any of those people any more than I know anybody else in the news but, as I said, they seem normal enough for me and I like to see what they're doing.  So, the guy that sold the paper mill has plans for some riverfront development; sounds good to me and another sign of the economic resurgence of the area.  Any thoughts, Mr. Beagles?  Are projects like that a done deal with behind the scenes shenanigans like we see down here in the Big Onion, or is it mostly on the up and up?

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No changes here except a conscious decision to focus on the stuff that I like, that I'm curious about, or stuff that is just plain silly and amuses me.  The routine crap gets done when it gets done but it hasn't backed up on me yet.  I don't think I've ever really enjoyed peace and quiet like I have recently.  No radio, hardly any TV, and minimal computer time; the ideas are flowing fast and furious and now I have the good sense to write stuff down and keep track of everything.  The magnetic banana is showing some promise.  And I'm still finding cool stuff as I continue to refine the organizing, like the high-density 2-part foam that's used in boat building and sound proofing.  Very cool stuff, has a lot of potential.  It's good to have a nice room to play in.

Fun in the kitchen continues as I develop my one-egg omelette, an experiment that is turning out much better than I expected.  If you like hardtack (Ry-Krisp) do I have a meal for you!

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The 14th Dalai Lama wrote "I believe the very purpose of life is to be happy."  I think he nailed it.

And every day we're about 26,000 miles further away from the sun but I don't think these two ideas are related.  It seems like I've hardly moved.

 

The horror, the horror,

 So it's been about two weeks since we have heard from Beagles.  I sent him an email a few days into the silence asking him if he was ok and he said he was but that this Ukraine thing had gotten him down and he just didn't want to write.  I figure it's this thing where you sit down and pontificate and meanwhile across the ocean the slaughter of the innocents is going on and there you are twiddling at the keys.

Or something like that.  He didn't go too deeply into his reasons.

I spend forty minutes a weekday treading on the treadmill, I push myself to panting and sweating and that is unpleasant, but the worst part is how boring it is.  The answer to that is podcasts.  The Story of Rome has about 200 chapters and I am halfway through it.  Rome is past its conquering stage and is just trying to keep itself together, and doing well enough, but just north the barbarians are waiting.  What was that we used to sing so proudly in our revolutionary days? The old get older and the young get stronger.

Those were rough unenlightened days back then, but I think it was the beginning of western civ.  Things were getting organized, though you can't make an empire without breaking eggs and the battles were pretty bloody.  The Roman soldier after a victory was much happier knowing they were going to loot the city than knowing it would be welcomed into the great Roman Empire, subject of course to paying a high rent.  

One of the most dispiriting things to me is the way the Russian soldiers go along with the program.  A Roman soldier never thought twice about killing women and babies.  Why should he?  Isn't that what everybody else was doing at the time?

Yes it was, but then we got Christianity which was flawed to be sure. but maybe it made us a little more civilized, at least you had to pretend that your cause was just.  Then there was technological progress which made things a little easier for most people which soothed out some of the savage.  Then my favorite period, the enlightenment, and then the democracies.  See we were getting somewhere.

Not so much the Russkies on the eastern edge of western civ.  They had those terrible czars to be sure, but western ideas were soaking in.  The revolution was nasty and so was Stalin but after that things got a little better, there was glasnost, there was Gorbachev.  There was widespread literacy, education, was the western sun melting the cold ice of the savage land?

I kind of thought so.  Putin was an evil man, but he was a pretty smart cookie too.  He wouldn't just plunge into some terrible slaughter that wouldn't even do his own country any good.

But here we are.  See that's mostly what dispirits me.  That all this progress I thought we had made over the last two thousand years.  Well we really haven't.

Watched Apocalypse Now Saturday night for about the tenth time.  The Vietnam war was not a high point in western civ.  We did our fair share of atrocities, but at least when they came to light we were ashamed.

And of course the movie was based on Conrad's book, The Heart of Darkness.

The horror.  The horror.

Good Friday

 Friday already?  Geez, what a quiet week.  It has been a pretty busy one for me, but also, well you know, one likes a little something to work with, another opinion to agree or disagree or maybe just have a little something to add to.  And then there is that feeling of Omigod am I here all alone, which is not a good feeling.

I'm afraid my busy week continues into this day, which is Good Friday, which is always the last Friday of spring break (who remembers when it was Clean Up Week?  Did anybody ever clean up?) so the religion neutral state could give you Good Friday off, but it would not be a religious day.  

Well well enough, I guess it has kept the peace all these years.  

Good Friday to the dawgs and be careful out there, and may a  more productive week be coming.

ladies' days, ink strained wretches, and little lidded bottles

 I lived more like 80,000 feet from Wrigley, a bus ride to downtown and then deep into the bowels of the earth, emerging into the sunlight in a great roaring el train into the center of the mysterious north side where the streets had names and not numbers and the people had like webbed toes or something, because surely they were not like us at all,

We came on Ladies' Day, my mother, maybe another neighbor lady, and a half dozen of us kids frozen in awe at riding in a train so far above the city that cars looked like toys and people looked like ants.  We were pretty young then and didn't know the intricacies of the game but we knew enough to root root root for the home team, unless we were distracted by something like one of the adults opening up the baskets and handing out potato chips or sandwiches wrapped in wax paper.  We never bought a hot dog because they were way too expensive.

In fact it occurs to me, that we never bought anything, what was the ballpark getting out of us?  Well the adults had to pay for the kids to get in at half price, and as I recall back in those days those seas of green seats were pretty empty, and I grew up to become a Cub fan even though all the other kids were and remained Sox fans.

Those ink stained wretches who later became real writers have not much in common with the scribes of today.  I go for the box score first and only if something like a beanball incident occurred and I want the details of that, do I skim through an article for more information.  They have this beautifully structured game, they have a century of cornball slang that gets better as it ages, they have an essentially meaningless event which gives them freedom to make of it anything that comments on the human condition.

And mostly they just complain, the owners oughta spend more money, the manager shoulda done things different in that rocky third inning, this or that way overpaid player was dogging it.  On and on and on like sportsradio at its worst.

Very interesting about those interchangeable lids.  It would seem at first that you would not want the tops to be interchangeable because then when somebody lost a lid they would have to buy a new bottle and that would be ka-ching in your cash register.  But maybe the big cap and bottle industry got together and realizing that if the parts were interchangeable, people would be better disposed to the whole industry and make more use of their product, and consumers and manufacturers would both be winners.  Kumbaya.

But I'm guessing the lid manufactures got sick and tired of making a lid for every damn bottle that came down the pike and said fuck you guys, we are only making one size lids and you will start making your bottles to fit our lids unless you want to be stuck with warehouses full of lidless bottles.

The Old Dog smells something fishy

Another fine evocative piece from Uncle Ken about the Cubs' opening day but, Holy Cow!, did it ever send The Old Dog on a prolonged journey down memory lane when he lived 1,333 feet from the pitcher's mound, as the crow flies.  You had to be there, back when bleacher tickets were dirt cheap, maybe $2 even on opening day, and there were no reserved seats; sit wherever you wanted.  Maybe you would see Bill Veeck sitting in the sun and you'd have a little chat.  And later in the game the chants would start: Right field sucks!  And then left field sucks!, and on and on.  Good times.

Which got me to thinking about how the Sports Section was the only place in the paper where the writers could let their spirits soar, waxing poetic about the athletes and their games, dull facts be damned.  And in the way that the internet leads you to places you never expected I found this old article about sports writing, and here's a taste:

Baseball has traditionally been the sport of choice for the American writer: it has the longest traditions and it offers the most (by way of statistics) to a detached analytical mind.

The full article is here and may be worth your while:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/06/american-sportswriting-benjamin-markovits

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Consider these images, gentlemen.  Three different plastic jars, manufactured by three different companies, yet all three lids are interchangeable.

 

 

Is there some hitherto unknown ISO diktat that mandates lid specifications or is there collusion in the cabal of Big Plastics?  Are THEY at it again?

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It's been a tough week for Mr. Lemon.  The transition to tetrahedron was successful but it cost him both eyes, making him blind.  His sacrifice will not be forgotten; Mr. Lemon, I salute you!

 

inside baseball

 Years ago when I was more of a baseball fan than I am now a friend turned me on to a little red book/magazine that came out every spring and contained the stats of every baseball player for the current year.  I refer to Who's Who in Baseball.  What interested me was not so much the averages but the listing of all the trades.  You could look up a guy and then the guys who he was traded for and then the guys who they were traded for and the next thing you knew it was time to trot out to happy hour.

It went out of business last year, maybe the year before, an obvious victim of the internet.  I was discussing this with the friend who turned me onto Who's Who, and he mentioned a site called The Baseball Reference.  It had all the stats and all the trades and just a whole lot of shit.

But I remember it in its pre internet days when it was a beast of a book. Every guy who ever stepped into the batter's box or toed the rubber was in it. 

What fascinated me the most about the book is there were all these guys, more than you would imagine, mostly old-timey guys, who had just one at bat, and in that at bat they had hit a homer, and I always wondered what, why not another at bat?  Did they get run over by a truck, did they find Jesus in some weird cult, did they decide that this baseball thing was a flash in the pan and get into investment banking?  We will never know.

Oh somewhere their remains may be moldering in some forgotten and run down cemetery.  Perhaps some freckle-faced kid will stumble against their fallen headstone in search of an errant foul ball and get a glimpse of the name and wonder a second or two before he hauls the torn horsehide back to the ballyard,

But other than that there is just the name, the team, and the date in that big fat book.  And every now and then some kid, because who else would do such a stupid thing, pauses his finger on the stat and maybe mouths the name, and when he does that does the guy feel a shiver in his backbone as he strums the harp or is poked by the pitchfork?

Opening Day

 Last night the weather guys on the local channels were all predicting rain, spotty though, and most of them predicted the game would go on.  This morning my Yahoo thing is predicting no rain.  Windy though, from the south, which should carry the balls to the fences.  And this time of the year the batters have the edge over the pitchers.  It takes awhile for pitchers to hone their arms to guide that spheroid into that tiny rectangle from sixty feet and six inches away, while the batter gets to just stand there and wait for it, watch the spin of the seams, and make a lucky guess and bam, there it goes over the fences to the roar of the crowd.

The crowd, which is a bit disgruntled because of the strike and the lockout and the haggling over nickels when both sides are making oh just huge piles of money, which has delayed opening day, which is like delaying summer, rises to their feet and cheers on as the slugger joyously rounds the bags to the cheers of his teammates and everything is forgotten because baseball is back, and it will be back forever, just as spring and her bustier sister summer, are back and whispering in your ear that they have always loved you and now that they are here they will never go away again and will stay with you forever

Goofy old guy laughing

No it's a plastic lemon head that you can squeeze to make its mouth move.

Part of Uncle Ken's charm is his recent tendency to ignore details, get facts wrong, jump to conclusions and abandon any pretense of objective reality.  Feel free to change your mind on this one; it doesn't matter since we're not playing the same game.  Old guy grumbling, indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Anybody else fooling around with those gadgets to vacuum seal food for storage or sous vide cooking?  I'm talking about the cheapo version with reusable bags and the little plastic hand pump, less than $20.  Surprisingly strong suction; you should see what it can do to a plastic jar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, it's not Han Solo encased in Carbonite but it's an amusing distraction nonetheless.

old guy grumbling

 It's a lemon peel intact. No it's a plastic lemon head that you can squeeze to make its mouth move.  The squeezer would then be the voice of Mr Lemon, and if he were willing to learn the art of not moving his lips, why it could become a bit of a ventriloquist's show, well a bit, like if someone were, say, playing a harmonica he could use his discourses to to fill in between numbers to give his lips a rest,

Mainstream movies of my youth were not very good.  They were still under the heel of the Hay's code which was bad enough, but they were also very stiff and they were all pretty much alike, in the end the good got rewarded, the bad got punished, and love, love, love, always conquered everything.  It was like beer of the day, you could get Budweiser or Miller, or Schlitz, but they all tasted the same, if you wanted to get something good you had to get foreign beer, and to see good movies you had to see foreign films.  

The new boldness in the movies of the late sixties was like craft beer.  I used to go matinees a lot, and then I started going down to the video store.  The pattern of the fifties was still going on where you would hear a bit of buzz, and then the reviews would come out just as the movie was hitting town, and the movie people of the town saw them together about the same town and you could talk about them together over coffee or beers.  We were like a community.

The video store was fine but Netflix was even better because they had such a wide selection, almost any movie you could want to see they had it.  Later on they offered the streaming option, but I never opted for it because I like getting things in the mail, and those streaming things they never had deleted scenes and bloopers and director's narratives.  

But the DVD's that arrived in the mail began to skip, and when I complained nobody seemed to care.  And the library was not as extensive as it once was, and so I made the move to streaming.  But streaming turned out to have even fewer movies, it was mostly like Netflix tv shows that were better than regular tv, but not very much.

And now I have Prime too, long story I guess it will take up a post someday, but there are like twenty other streaming services and if you want to see a movie on them you have to pay a lot of dough, or get a trial subscription which you know you never will remember to cancel in time or maybe you just cannot get it at all.  So you no longer have a community of watchers, everybody is watching their own streaming services, and there is no common range of movies to discuss over the break table.

But of course there is no break table for us old guys.  You know I hated working and I am not tempted to ever do it again.  But work buddies, I rather miss them.

Anyway movies today, the way they are distributed, it sucks.  All I want to say this cloudy Monday morning.

Still wasting time

While fiddling around with one project I got a little sidetracked and came up with this goofy thing.  Smile, dammit!

 

changing the subject

 This just in on NPR, an expert is saying that the reason the Russkies went in Chernobyl was that they didn't know where they were going.  They didn't have no maps, they didn't have no nothing.

And who knew anything?  The latest intelligence reports from the USA are saying that even Putin didn't know, that his generals somehow went renegade and he didn't know that the troops were draftees or something.  Well I don't know.  Why would we be sharing our intelligence with the rest of the world unless we thought doing so would help us out?  And once you are there you might as well fib a bit to help us out  a bit more, and as long as you are there you might as well fib a lot to help us a lot.  I'm a bit skeptical.  Not that I think it is necessarily wrong to fight a propaganda war with the Russkies, but I am just skeptical is all.

I guess my pet theory is that Putin is nuts.  Isolation and fear of covid, and not starting out as the most stable of people, like Aguirre in the Wrath of God, he is alone on a raft with a motley crew of monkeys who he thinks are his army rushing through white water to the next precipice. 

I brought in the movie reference to change the subject because basically we are just repeating what we are seeing in the news and since we are both watching the news we are just repeating stuff we already know.

So the movies.

In the beginning there was the Colony, an imposing edifice standing tall over a wide expanse of bungalows at the vital nexus of Kedzie and Fifty-Ninth Street.  It was air-conditioned, which was a big deal back in the day.  No individual homes, certainly no bungalows had air-conditioning.  Some stores might have it.  The big, brand new Supermarket, the High (Quality)  Low (Prices) at Fifty-Sixth and Kedzie had it behind those miracle doors who, get this, could sense when you were approaching them and opened up, and knew as well when you were passing through so they would not clamp shut on you and crush you in their metal grip, but waited meekly, politely, as you passed through, and shut quietly when you were done, keeping the air conditioning firmly in the building.

But you could not spend two or three hours in the supermarket.  The employees rightly assumed that any kid just hanging around was likely to get into trouble probably sooner rather than later.  

So they would shoo you out and you would amble three blocks south and there would be the Colony who loudly proclaimed that it was Air Conditioned, displaying a row of frosty icicles above the word to emphasize the point.  And inside not only was it cool, but it was dark and on the silver screen there was a movie.  Any movie would do, even those boring adult movies where adults would just sit around and talk (The way they did in real life, they had all the money, all the cars, all of everything, and what did they do with all this cool stuff, they mostly just sat around and talked, drove me crazy.), but there were also Tarzan movies, and cowboy movies, and greatest of all they had monster movies.  

There are still monster movies, but they are made for adults which means that there is a lot of oh, bullshit, slow, boring, and meaningless, just so adults can pretend they are watching some relevant and clever whatever instead of something stupid.  

Well I am digressing and the hour is growing late and my clothes are all dried so I will continue after the weekend.

Happy Friday everybody.