Sunday, December 15, 2019

The morning after the day before.



Very little to post this morning; we had company last night, which meant house cleaning and cooking before and entertaining after. And it was entertaining, certainly for us; I hope it was for our guests as well. Our dogs had a wonderful time and are very sleepy as I write this, unusual for this time of the morning.

I did learn a few things that I thought were interesting, or at least funny, that I thought I'd mention.

🎄 Windows Media Player is hard to find on your laptop when you're having a conversation and you used to use iTunes to play old CDs on your old laptop but you haven't downloaded it for the new one and you wind up giving up and not being DJ and leaving the Charlie Brown Christmas album in your D drive and the hell with it.

🎄 Young folks report being so freaked out by the blackface scene in Holiday Inn that they are forced to skip over that whole section of the film or just turn it off entirely. Of course it's offensive to modern eyes, but people accustomed to watching all kinds of depravity and violence in movies ought to be made of sterner stuff. It also shows the lack of historical perspective that so characterizes our age. The most famous blackface performer of all time, Al Jolson, was as far from being racist as he could be, for example. Anyway, it didn't seem to bother Canadian liberals to vote for their most famous blackface performer.

🎄 Say what you will about magazines as a dying industry, but Good Housekeeping still has some amazing recipes to offer. My wife found a pie recipe that was a big hit. I was the cheap labor that put the thing together, with help from Mr. Pillsbury for the crust. The magazine billed it as a Thanksgiving recipe, being made of pears and cranberries, but we defended it on the grounds that A) there was still one more week until winter, and B) options for Christmas deserts tend to be along the line of yule log (would like some practice before making one for guests), plum pudding (ditto), cookies (not a sit-down food), and fruitcake (I would not spring that on unsuspecting friends). Anyway, the pie was roundly applauded.

It was a lovely time, but I'm exhausted. I'll return with more of the usual stuff tomorrow. Enjoy your Gaudete Sunday!

2 comments:

Dan said...

I think I'm the only one in my extended family, both sides, that likes fruitcake.
Everyone else's loss.
Bad thing is it's getting harder and harder to find any in the stores, even though Claxton, GA, is only about forty miles away. Haven't seen Entenmann's fruitcake in the stores around here for years. Ordered some from some monks a few years ago, but that gets pretty expensive pretty fast.

Sounds like you had a fun evening, though.

FredKey said...

We did, Dan, thanks! Last year we made our own fruitcake and it was good, but we're going to punch it up a little with more spices this year. I will run the recipe here if it works out.