Technical difficulties.

 

“Fiber damage” — sounds like some psychotic squirrel went after the wires. Hope to return to what passes for normalcy here tomorrow.

Having a X time.

This one's kicked around the Internet for a while, and I went looking for its source.

It's a clever take of the early-to-mid twentieth century type -- using the forms of the new era (in both senses of the word) to poke fun at the stuffiness of the formal letter-writing era and the current mania for speed and efficiency, while at the same time affecting the gladhanding merriment of the man on the go. But is it real?

I wondered, because while most of the slangese seemed American (all wet, dough-re-mi), needing "a pint" seemed more British. However, a man in American desiring a pint would normally be looking for a 16-ounce bottle of booze to carry him along rather than a pint of beer in the pub, so that might fit.

And I was right, in the end. Thanks to eBay, I found other cards of this type. What we see here is just half of the front of the card; here's a whole card.

The seller included a photo of the card's back, which told me the thing was made by Dexter Press of West Nyack, New York, a half hour drive from where I'm sitting as I type this.

The Postcard History site has helpful information on Dexter, founded by Thomas Dexter as a one-man press in 1920. It's well known among postcard buffs for the "natural color" postcards like the one above, which were printed after 1952. Another postcard-interest site tells us that Dexter closed its operations in New York in 1984, and moved to Aurora, Missouri: "As a subsidiary, they now print religious material under the MWM Dexter name." But that entry was from 2017; an attempt to follow the link to the MWM Dexter site came up blank. At some point they became (in whole or part) Dexter Hospitality, but now it looks like that's gone too. I fear for the current state of Mr. Dexter's company.

As for the Indian-themed card above, the Postcard History site dates it to 1962. That makes sense. The language in the oh-so-snappy checklist is just a little dated. It doesn't sound like the way the kids talked in 1962 ("pep" and "helluva" sound more forties to me), but probably the way a breezy guy who'd been a kid ten or twenty years earlier would talk.

So that's what I found out about a little slice of Americana. If anyone knows more about the fate of Mr. Dexter's company, drop me a line. I'm always curious about publishing. 

O Solo Memo.

Yeah, was busy yesterday. Beloved friends came over for dinner. We hadn't panic cleaned in a while, and it showed. So, once again we have Sunday memes for you, fresh off the meme presses, in lieu of any long-form thoughts.

And on this topic:

 

Hungry for a football?

Not hungry for some football, but a football. 

Yes, this little... thing is supposed to be a football-shaped tortilla chip. See the laces on top?

Tostitos, a Pepsi-owned Frito-Lay product, has done foot-ball shaped chips before, but not if I recall correctly in their Hint of Lime flavor. That's the favorite of the L&T Mrs. Key.  

These are thicker and smaller than the usual Tostitos chip, which is okay -- less chance of breakage when going for the dip. While not being an authentic-type cantina-style tortilla chip, they're still a much closer approximation than Fritos. 

A lot are still busted in the bag, of course. Despite the nitrogen in the bag, fumbles will happen, and I'd say maybe 40% of the chips did not maintain a perfect football shape. They still taste the same, of course, and the proof of the tortilla chip is in the eating.

Pepsico's sponsorship with the NFL is intended to meld the football-watching experience with the chip-and-soda consuming experience, but nope -- I'm still not watching. Since the NFL decided to take a dump on its biggest fans in 2020, I've maintained my anti-NFL stance, which will probably remain in place until Roger Goodell walks out of the building with his cardboard box of desk tchotchkes. Those of us who hoped that at least the NFL and the armed forces would be resistant to the poke of wokeness were and are disgusted by just how fast they folded. They collapsed like a, well, a bag of Tostitos under a fat guy's ass. All that remained were busted chips and some gas.

It's as well for me, since the Giants suffered their worst playoff loss, against the Santa-hating Eagles, since the embarrassing Super Bowl XXVI. I wouldn't have even bothered with the football-shaped chips, but that was all they had, and my wife wanted Hint of Lime Tostitos.

On the bright side, when it comes to eating the ball, a football-shaped chip is a lot more pleasant than being sacked by a 300-pound lunatic, so there's that. 

Board of it all.

Today's trash day, and guess what is going out into the garbage and why! 

It's hard to tell, perhaps, from that picture, so I'll explain: It's our ironing board. And the weird angle is because it won't stand up. And it won't stand up because one of the legs snapped off by the hinge bit. And that's why it's going into the garbage. 

And why did it break?

Never iron angry.

Not me, not your level-headed model of coolness in the face of frustration Fred. Who's also a big fat liar. Actually the anger came from my wife, who was trying to iron the big curtains in the family room that had come out of the dryer, and they always seem to fight ironing like it's Ali and the iron is Joe Frazier. 

And she was allllllmost done when the board snapped and hit the floor. Which, as you can guess, just elevated her mood precipitously. 

But it should be noted that this is a pretty old board, as modern stuff goes. How old? Let me pull off the cover and show you the original surface....

That's right -- it was a Crayola-themed ironing board. Why? I am not sure. I just remember when we got married, and our previous roommates had owned the ironing boards in our lives prior to that, and no one puts ironing board on the bridal registry. So one Sunday night -- for some reason I'm certain it was a Sunday night -- we were shopping around and saw this one cheap. At the time, that being the nineties, Binney and Smith was licensing the Crayola name and logo on a lot of things, like stuffed toys and T-shirts. But why an ironing board? 

Well, apparently there are several craft projects that you can do with an ironing board and Crayola products. I suppose this ironing board was a way to promote that. I had plenty of Crayola crayons in my youth, but I promise you, my mom would never have allowed any of them near her iron.

Over the years we got some good use from the board, cheap as it was. In my office days I liked to have a nice pressed shirt -- that, children, was before recent times, when you can show up to work in your nothing but your nacho-stained underpants and no one cares. Often on Sundays I would iron shirts and some pants for the week, and maybe shine up the shoes. It wasn't all that long ago, but I feel like it was an entirely different galaxy from the one in which we live now. 

Well, I'm sorry to see the old board go. It was fun, even if we had to cover up the thin Crayola cover with a more sturdy padded cover with boring ol' flowers on it. I always knew there was a green crayon underneath anyway.

SNOW!!!!

So we finally got a for-real snow event yesterday. 

OR DID WE?

Six to eight inches of snow were expected. The district decided to close the schools as of Tuesday night. At ten in the morning Wednesday, not a flake had fallen. At eleven, birds were chirping. At one p.m. my Windows system software said "Snowing now," but my actual windows told a different story. It was starting to look like a non-event. Not that our local bloated school administration cared. They hadn't had a snow day off yet this winter, and by God they were going to get one. 

We northerners like to make fun of how southerners panic when a little bitty snow squall shows up, but aren't we a lot wimpier than we used to be? I know it's our inner Yorkshiremen that make us look back and say how we trekked through five feet of snow during a storm that made the Children's Blizzard of 1888 look like a gentle dusting -- but when I was a kid I'm pretty sure the schools didn't close before the snow even started. 

There may be reasons for this. More children live in single-parent households now, and in houses where both parents work, and if there's no adult home to fetch the kid because the weather got bad fast, what can the school do? Better to leave them home in the first place. 

Also, at least in theory, weather forecasting is better now than it was when we were tots, what with the News 10 Dopplercast 5000 or whatever your local station advertises. So sure, it may be sunny and warm now, but you wait -- Dopplercast 5000 says blizzard by lunchtime, and blizzard it shall be. 

Well, at last, at 2:30: 

An hour or so later it had turned to rain. Some of the neighbors' kids got some sledding in:

And this morning:

It rained all night and the temperature got up over forty. In other words, not only was there barely any snow in this snow event, but the weather wiped out the snow we already had.

I can live with it. My back didn't have to brave the shovel, I didn't have to pay Piers Plowman who does the driveway, and the children got their vacation day. But I can't remember the last time a forecast was this far off. 

There's a local guy who does weather forecasting on Facebook, and I don't know what his story is, but he's good. He uses data from weather services all over the hemisphere, and knows how to do the math. Even he got rooked on this one. At three in the afternoon he wrote: 

This one I did not see coming. We are experiencing warm air advection which is warm air approaching and over riding the cold dense air in place. Typically this produces moisture in the midlevel atmosphere and would produce precipitation with upward forcing motion. In our case snowfall.

However, at this point it has plateaued and has created a dry slot bubble in the midlevel of the atmosphere as wintry precipitation is in the process of transforming to rainfall. I am not sure how long before the dry slot bubble fills back in with precipitation.

The end result is we may experience this dry slot in the weather for a couple of hours. Precipitation likely returns as a mix or rainfall.... Weather can be fickle.

You can say that again, brother!

Mystopia.

When I was in college, I took an English class called Utopias and Dystopias. At that time the term dystopia wasn't nearly as well known as it is now; in fact, another English professor I had asked me to define the term when I mentioned the class. Utopia and dystopia as words are not natural antipodes; utopia came from Greek and just means no (ou) place (topos), where dystopia means bad place. 

But we all knew about dystopias, man. Everyone in the liberal arts majors was expecting the world to end, almost certainly in a shootout between the Americans and the Russians. And it'd be America's fault! And those fascists on the right would take over whatever was left! 

I was thinking about that after fellow Bleatnik Mark Ingram posted this meme on the comments of the Great Lileks's site: 

It made me think that sure, if we follow today's wickedness and stupidity to the end of the line, this satirical take is all too likely. But on the other hand, the future, for good or ill, never turns out the way we prophesy. Sometimes the projections even look silly in retrospect. I'm temped to call these miscues mystopias, kind of an eggcorn of a name, but why not.

It was not uncommon, for example, in the eighties to imagine a mallworld, in which all of humanity is reduced to nothing more than consumers and producers, and everyone is glued to the TV. In fact, Somtow Sucharitkul, who wrote a lot for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in those days, did a whole series of stories published as a book called Mallworld. Sucharitkul is a terrific writer and is not to be faulted for failing to foresee that the malls would be closing and retailers panicking. 

This was similar to the consumerist hell future seen in Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! comic books and the short-lived Max Headroom TV series. Fortunately, the future's not what it used to be. However, one common thread is these works is that government and commercial enterprises are constantly conspiring to screw over the people. Maybe that bit isn't so far-fetched.

I think it says something about humanity that we have more fictional dystopias than utopias. It's always easier to imagine hell than heaven. So it's probably good that our predictions don't ever quite hit the coffin nail on the head.

While many fictional dystopias are terrible societies (as in We, 1984, The Man in the High Castle, and so on) some are just dead. Yes, good ol' apocalypse, where straggling humans try to survive in the wasteland of the world. I think of these as thanatopias, or death worlds. Back in the day you could rely on World War III to provide the mass deaths, although alien invasion was a good standby. Artificial intelligence has also moved up the ranks as our computers have gotten smarter. Ecological disaster has marched right up to the front. Disease, especially man-made disease, was another good one. In fact, we have just seen a man-made disease jump the lab and kill millions, so it's hard to not find that as the most plausible means of annihilation going at the moment.

Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the atomic deathwatch clock ten seconds up, closer to the midnight doom time than ever before. Despite Russia's failure in the battlefield and desperation to win at all costs, and the saber-rattling of China, and Iran's desperation to get the bomb, I find it hard to believe that we're closer to nuclear war now than we were at the height of the Cold War. I think the Bulletin is just getting lonely for attention since Chinese Death Virus stole all the headlines. I certainly hope so, anyway.

Mission: Get into places and back out.

In the old Mission: Impossible show, the one thing you could always count on was that the team would have really good forged papers. They never got caught because they used a Form 13-F when the guards would have expected a Form 16-B. Peter Lupus just handed over the clipboard, a guy looked at it, and soon a mysterious crate with Greg Morris inside would be delivered. Later it would open up and the cat burglar would get to work. 

In the days pre-9/11, a friend of mine was convinced that you could get into any office building in Manhattan with a clipboard and maybe a lanyard. Just look like you know what you're doing and brazen it out. Sometimes it wouldn't even be that big a deal. I read an article about how gorgeous the lobby and elevators are in the Chrysler Building, so one day I just went in there wearing my suit and tie. Went straight in, rode in the elevator, left. Didn't even have to sign a guest book. (They are gorgeous, BTW.)

The clipboard act might have been worth a try to get into more secure properties back in the day. But security began to tighten after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and now, well, it would be easier to get a four-ounce bottle on an airplane than to sneak into a building with such a simple trick. 

However, something tells me this probably would still work.

It's the same principle as my old pal's clipboard gag -- use the appearance of mission and authority to do what you're not supposed to do. It won't work in a Manhattan office building now, but apparently you can take whatever you want from stores. This is partly because security in a Walmart isn't that great, but partly because no one cares anymore. If Target and other stores in California are just going to let looters and thieves take off with whatever, why should a branch in, say, Omaha care that much? 

So that's the world we've built in the new millennium -- maximum security for everyday schmucks, crooks running wild in the streets. For the first time in my life I hear about stores being shut down because people are stealing too much. That's serious. Ordinary petty theft is a minor infection; this kind of thievery is a fatal disease. The parasite has taken over the organism.

I had another friend whose son got in trouble with the law back in the oughts. This Napoleon of crime had the idea with his buddy to go into Target, grab all the video game discs they could hold, and dash out the door. So, the kid got a criminal record for his trouble. Now it appears he wasn't an idiot, he was just ahead of his time. 

Light in January.

I'm a morning guy, and my dog is a morning dog, and as I noted a couple of weeks ago, at this time of year that means darkness. Which is not great. Cars don't see us, teenagers sneak up on us, animals are out there and while Izzy may smell them, I can't see them. 

Well, my wife got me this. 

I seldom do product plugs on the page, except maybe for some foods that aren't good for me, but I will plug this. (It's electrical, get it? har) It's a rechargeable headband that has a flashlight on the temple and a glow band for general luminosity on the front (that yellow strip). And when I say it glows, I mean it glows like Rudolph. 

When we're out where there are no streetlights and no sidewalk, at the time of year when the sun doesn't rise until past seven and the sky is usually plastered with cloud cover anyway, it's nice to be able to press a button on the headband and get this aura to illuminate the darkness. It lights up everything within about 30-40 feet, I'd guess, and certainly warns any cars that we're out there far better than just reflecting tape or the like would do. A second press of the button sets the glow strip on a less-bright / less battery-sucking level. I've yet to run out of juice on one of our walks, though, maybe because the sun eventually does come up. 

What really interested me from a personal-history standpoint was the flashlight on the side. 

Why? Because like most red-blooded American boys, my entire function in life appeared to have been to hold the flashlight in the wrong spot and annoy my father. Car trouble, insulation work, electrical wiring, plumbing -- anytime there was a job that required working in a dark spot, you can be sure I would be there holding the light for hours. My attention would wander and so would the light, and I'd get rebuked. In my misty water-colored memory, this seems to have taken up approximately 37% of my childhood. 

Well, don't I wish my dad were still with us so that he could see this miracle! A mere headband, so much more compact than a miner's helmet but with the same power of light! Dad could have worked in peace and gotten things done faster, and I could have been doing something more fun, like homework or going to the dentist. I won't say Dad didn't try, with products like the Snake Light giving some relief, but even they had to be moved around as he worked and there was never a perfect spot to hang them from. 

The headband's flashlight also has two levels of power. Plus, when you have it set to whichever function you want, you can turn on the side sensor -- this allows you to turn the thing on or off with just a wave of your hand by the button. When wearing big bulky gloves, this is a helpful feature. 

Now the complaint: The thing is made in China, and it shows. The glow strip partly detached after a few weeks of use. But it was easy to superglue it back on, and it's stayed in place since.

If I have another quibble, and I really don't, it's that when out in the cold I like to keep the hood up on my coat. This is fine with the glow strip, but it blocks the flashlight. Nothing much to be done on that score. I only use the flashlight when out with the woofer to zero in on whatever he's left behind that I must pick up, and he usually waits until we get home to do that.

So if you're in town and driving around early, and you see a light in the darkness, don't worry. It's not an alien or a ghost. It's just ol' Fred and his fuzzy sidekick, getting our morning air at some insane hour where any smart person would be sleeping. Give us a wave -- we'll leave the light on for ya.

Memey like Sunday morning.

Busy day yesterday so... break out the memes! 

Good morning... What hurts today?

Noted this on Lileks's blog the other day

Mailed it in.

In case you feel like you're wasting time with whatever you're doing, let me just remind you of something:

The US Postal Service has its own podcast.

These days, every organization has to have its own pricey Web site, podcast, video introduction, YouTube channel, and LinkedIn page. Some never get much farther than all that. The part where they actually do something useful, benefit society, and/or make money? Forgot in all the excitement.

It's weird to see that the post office has a podcast. What is the post office's rep? Slow, late to adopt tech, humorless, a dinosaur, at worst just a benefits program that happens to deliver the mail, as General Motors became a benefits program that happens to make cars. The post office doesn't even have a lot of fun stamps anymore. The last time a stamp issue was a big deal was the Young Elvis vs. Fat Elvis vote in 1992.

I was looking for the tracking tools on the USPS site when I came across the link for the podcast, available on Apple Podcasts on on the Simplecast site. So, okay, what the hell do they talk about on a podcast by the post office? What could possibly interest you and me, going about our business and not much thinking about mail? I mentioned to my wife that the post office has a podcast and she said, "I can't imagine a duller one."

I downloaded episode 32, new this past Tuesday, in which Bill Gicker, USPS director of Stamp Services, talks about the 2023 stamp program. Other episodes deal with topics like postal history, delivery preparations for the holidays, the origin of the zip code, and why mail-in voting is totally safe, you bet, no cheating here. Each one is just around half an hour. 

Well, it actually was fairly interesting. Got some standard jukey intro music, and then the host introduces the guest, and they talk about post office things. I learned some info bits from the episode I heard -- like, new stamp designs are chosen three years before they are issued, a citizen's group is included in the voting, and the post office is at least as obsessed with diversity as any other American organization. I don't think I heard the name of a straight white person mentioned among the upcoming 2023 issues except Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (The current rule says someone must be deceased for three years before being eligible to be enstampified.) Peanuts stamps do very well, according to Gicker, as does the Black Heritage series. The host is fine and all, but I'm not much into postal things, so I don't know that I'd download another episode. Maybe some of the American history-tied episodes. (They did not mention that once again! the price of a first-class stamp is going up, this Monday the 22nd, to 63 cents.)

I'm sure there's an audience for this stuff -- even though interest in philately has declined, it has not gone away entirely. It might be of interest to employees; the post office currently has more than 516,000 full-timers on staff (about the population size of Atlanta, Georgia), and no doubt millions of former and aspiring employees in the wings. And the beauty of the podcast environment, like that of the blog (cough, cough), is that don't need to put up big bucks to design, write, and produce the thing. Why, sometimes one idiot with an obsession (ahem) is all it takes. So the USPS may not be spending much, but they got a PR program out of it. 

I guess it seems odd because -- why do it all? We know the post office loses money every year, and the odds of it being able to become a money-making enterprise are about as good as the odds of it being able to lay off redundant workers -- roughly 0%. Most of us treat it like a utility, so it's like if the local water company had a podcast. It could be interesting -- clean water available on demand is a great luxury in the history of the world -- but why do it at all? 

If you're the kind of person who likes checking out the odd spots in podcast world, check it out and let me know what you think. It's hard to find stats on podcast listeners or subscribers, but Mailin' It does have a 3.6-star (out of 5) rating from 182 reviewers, so someone must be enjoying it. But it just seems like another way that modern organizations spend time, effort, and resources to tell people how great they are instead of actually being great. (See also: the Academy Awards.)

Wake-up juice.

Scandinavians and other northern types love their coffee. Charts of the top coffee-consuming nations vary from year to year, but among the top coffee drinkers you will always find Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Canada. Why? Because A) it's cold and they want to drink something hot and B) there's no sun for six months out of the year and they need caffeine to stay awake. 

 

A long time ago I visited Norway, one of the nations in my ancestral mishmash, and I remember that people sucked down coffee like they would die without it, and also that the coffee was really good. My wife, having heard such tales, and being a coffee hound herself, got me a couple of bags of Norway's finest coffee for Christmas. Here's one: 

 

Kjeldsberg is a coffee roaster in Trondheim, Norway, and I don't think there's any more Norwegian-sounding city than Trondheim. You could say it all day. Trondheim Trondheim Trondheim. Anyway, Rasmus Kjeldsberg started the company in 1856, correctly predicting that coffee was going to be a big business. That makes Kjeldsberg older than venerable American brands like Maxwell House (1892), Chock Full o' Nuts (1926), Martinson's (1898), Chase & Sanborn (1874), and Hills Bros. (1900), but not quite Folgers (1854). However, most U.S. brands have been bought and sold by big companies over the years*, and the quality of the coffee has not stayed top-notch, dare I say. Kjeldsberg is, I believe, still its own business, and business is good.

I don't consider myself a coffee snob, but I have to say that the Kjeldsberg kids know what they're doing. The two varieties I tried were delicious--full-bodied without being acidic and nasty, rich without tasting burned. Honest injun, it was better than any major American brand I know. It even surprised my wife, who expected some kind of thick Eurotrash goop that could only be forced down with cigarettes and baguettes. Well done, my Norske friends!

Many moons ago, when the idea of quality coffee was sweeping the nation (and we could always use some more sweeping), the head of a small company at which I was employed came back from the Frankfurt Book Fair. We were in the business of importing foreign books and Americanizing them for the US trade. While in Germany she had been in a discussion with some of the shifty foreigners about coffee, and they were comparing the coffee found in Italy, Germany, and other nations. 

"What do you think of American coffee?" she asked. 

After a moment, one of the fellows said, "It, too, is a beverage."

She thought that was hilarious. I admire the remark as well -- it so perfectly combines the desire to appear polite with the desire to look down upon others that perhaps no other continent can do as the Europeans do. 

Oh, well. I'll give them credit for the joe. We'll take everything else on a case-by-case basis.

⛾⛾⛾⛾⛾

* For example, Chock Full o' Nuts, Chase and Sanborn, and Hills Bros. are currently owned by Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA, the American branch of Italian giant Massimo Zanetti Beverage Group; Maxwell House is owned by conglomerate Kraft Heinz; and Folgers is owned by J.M. Smucker Company, having broken free from America-hating Procter & Gamble in 2008, where it had been since 1963.

Back to nature: Massive die-off edition.

I guess this is food week on the old blog, although maybe not always an appetizing one. 

Off and on over the last few years, I've seen articles suggesting that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is a lot healthier than the modern agriculture-based lifestyle, and better for the environment as well. Articles on CNN, Psychology Today, the Portland Press-Herald, and many others tout those taut and hearty bands of fishin', huntin', foragin' man- and womanhood, compared to our fat, sedentary Olive Garden-suckin' selves. Even snooty science journals give the thumbs-up to the H-G lifestyle, although admitting that the high childhood mortality, illness, and deaths by accident are a bummer. 

Hunting-gathering does seem to have its advantages. No mortgage, no taxes, nothing to weigh you down. Just go and live off the land. Away from civilization. King of the non-road! You might say,

No phone, no lights, no motor car,

Not a single luxury,

Like Robinson Crusoe,

It's primitive as can be.

I don't think it's for me. I'd hate to leave all my books behind, but that's part of bidding farewell to civilization. As George Carlin put it so memorably, "That's all your house is--a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it."

There's just one other little problem with us all going ultra-Paleo. 

Hunter-gatherers need a lot of room. Since they don't herd and they don't plant, they can only get what they need from nature. Thus, as at least one study estimated that the world could only support about 10 million hunter-gatherer humans. Nature, in her goodness, would probably see to it that our numbers stayed in that range -- we'd eat ourselves into famine, or just beat one another's brains in when things got scarce. 

So if we're going to adopt that healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we'd better get started dying off, and in a hurry. There's more than 7 billion of us now, so we have to drop about that many humans; 10 million is a rounding error with numbers like that. 

Personally, I've always felt that those who hate civilization ought to go right ahead and leave it; that should cut down on a few right out of the gates. For the rest of us, I guess we'll just have to sit here all fat & lazy, surrounded by our stuff. Dang it.

Bygone favorites.

Calvin Trillin is still kicking. He's always been a terrific writer, great at the long-form feature, but like most people I was drawn to his short humor pieces. One I remember well was the essay pondering the disappearance of Chicken à la King. Chicken à la King was once a mighty dish that crossed the continent, then suddenly vanished. To quote from the piece:

There must be billions of gallons of chicken à la king somewhere. There was a time--in the 1950s, say--when the whole country seemed to be awash in chicken à la king. Thousands of Kiwanians ate it at Kiwanis luncheons. Kiwanians ate so much chicken à la king that whenever I heard them sing their song, "I'd Rather be a Kiwanian Than in Any Other Club," I expected to hear a few lines in there about the health-giving qualities of the dish that was giving strength and succor to all Kiwanians everywhere:

There's nothing can defeat us, 

Whatever life may bring. 

'Cause we can go and eat us 

Some chicken à la king. 

So I'd rather be a Kiwanian than in any other club.

It may be small succor to the Kiwanians and others that Swanson still makes a canned variety of the stuff, but perhaps it's cold comfort. The canned stuff cannot match the majesty of Chicken à la King in the wild!

Just in the time I've been hanging around the earth being a nuisance, I have seen ubiquitous foods vanishing into obscurity. Once exotic or high-falutin', these popular meals became a symbol of American yahooism and were discarded. Or maybe everyone just got bored. Also, following the Kingsley Amis rule of More will mean worse, the more popular a food becomes, the less likely it will be prepared well. 

Here are some that have gone the way of the dodo, Howard Johnson's, and the Automat:

Beef Stroganoff: Such a delight when done well! Which means, you can't go cheap on the beef. And no mushrooms. So simple, yet so many ways to screw it up, and oh so many did.

Chicken Chow Mein: The staple of every Chinese restaurant in America, now shuffled off to the side like a poor relation. I once saw it in a buffet. It was the only remotely Asian dish there. 

Duck à l'Orange: Duck was much more a mainstay of the American diet in the past. This fancy dish was a great way to serve it, the citrus counteracting the fattiness of the duck.

Turkey Tetrazzini: Once a popular way to get rid of leftover Thanksgiving turkey. No one ever asked "How do Italians know how to cook turkey?" Just eat it, kid. Santa's watching.

Chicken Cacciatore: Another beloved Italian dish, barely seen outside of Grandma's kitchen now. That Corningware casserole of hers must be at least 80 years old, right?  

Salisbury Steak: Did they ever eat this in Salisbury? Who cares? If you didn't get it from Mom or Grandma, you got it from Swanson, and were glad to get it. 

Fondue: Children, the legend says that once upon a time, if you got married, you got a Crock-Pot and a fondue set. Maybe a blender. The slow-cooker might become a real life-saver for busy families, and Dad might have fun on the weekends with the blender, but the fondue set? Used five times the first year and never after. 

Boeuf Bourguignon: The sign of high-class cooking in the mid-seventies, boeuf bourguignon was even a favorite of Superman's. 

But by the mid-1980s, for fine dining, zee boeuf was not considered enoeuf. Also in the boozy French meat department:

Coq au Vin: One cup of wine for the chicken, three cups for the chef...

Coquilles Saint Jacques: A fantastic way to cook scallops, but a good bit of work. Plus, scallops are excellent with very little frou-frou stuff, so why bother?

Salad Bars: As a food class, the American salad bar of the seventies was an amazing leap forward in food service. It actually got Americans of the era to eat some raw vegetables, although probably most of them also took five rolls and some chow mein.

Fried Oysters: This one goes way back, but people still alive remember when oysters were no big deal and frying them a perfectly reasonable way to eat them. Snobs might go the Oysters Rockefeller route, which is to oysters what Clams Casino is to clams. Come to think of it:

Clams Casino: There.

Veal Oscar: A shockingly complicated dish with crabmeat, asparagus, demi-glace, clarified butter, Béarnaise sauce, and so on -- no wonder restaurants don't want to bother with it. 

Lobster Newburg: I had it once in Maine, and it was really salty. I ate lobster at almost every meal and this was the only thing I didn't like. Sorry, Mr. Newburg (or Wenburg); probably just a bum cook that day. Also on the lobster end of obscurity: Lobster Thermidor. 

Shrimp Cocktail: Sure, you see it around, but not like in times past. Why, we had hot-and-cold running shrimp cocktail! Meaning, boiled and chilled or fried. Excellent either way.

Baked Alaska: The king of desserts! A spectacular presentation of fire (browned meringue, often done by setting booze ablaze) and ice cream! 

Time passes, and yesterday's snobby dish becomes today's nouveau riche garbage. Prime rib and chateaubriand may hang around thanks to wedding caterers, but the trendsetters have gone somewhere else. Lately they're snacking on whatever they find in the dirt or traveling to countries with very poor sanitation to pester the natives and eat there. I think I'd rather stick with Salisbury steak, tell you the truth.

Too soon?

Okay, I know this is essentially the same gag as yesterday's, but I had a lot of deadlines.

Also, the World Economic Forum is meeting this week, and I'd suggest that they think about these two gags when they start in about us peasants having to eat bugs. At least Marie Antoinette's legendary (i.e., not true) remark about letting the peasants eat cake supposed to have been born of ignorance. These sons of bitches mean it. Plus, cake is better than bugs.

Totally justified.

Groups.

A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to join a little writers' group she's putting together. I said no, but she's persistent (and very sweet). They haven't met yet, and I might still figure out a way to get out of it.

You might wonder why I would be reluctant. I'm not anti-joining, as so many of us are these days. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone came out in 2000, and despite his optimism I see little to suggest that community is making a comeback -- except on social media, where people are insane. The Chinese Death Virus didn't help matters, either. However, I'm not anti-community. I'm a believer in the importance of commitment to worthy causes. I'm simply not convinced of the value of writers' groups, or perhaps in my ability to bring any value to one. 

Years ago in my misspent youth another pal suggested we get together with some other people he knew who wanted to write. We all met in a downtown bar, and talked about writing for about three minutes, then drank and played darts for the next couple of hours. That was our one and only meeting. 

I think at the time I felt that the others were not very serious, but the truth was that I too was not very serious. I had no voice, no ideas that weren't absorbed from someone else's work, and it took quite a while and a lot of bad words out of me (in every sense) before I felt I could write something worth reading. And that was a purely lonely job. Maybe it would have been faster if someone were to show me a direction, but when everyone is a novice, no one knows what he's doing. Bad writing ideas and habits can spread like a common cold. Maybe we all have to hack our way out of the jungle by ourselves, even if it means we may go down into the quicksand. 

At its base, writing is a lonely business. Some people are great collaborators, but I think that works better in show business, where people have to cooperate with others and no individual's personal vision gets to the audience exactly as intended. When writing for the page rather than the stage, however, the writer has to have confidence that his vision can be seen and understood by others. 

Either way, there's a lot of ego involved. 

And that leads me to the other problem. If group members are really tough on one another, feelings will be hurt. If it's really light and upbeat, no one's going to learn anything. If I am going to have my ego bruised, I would like it to be done by the person who is simultaneously seeing to it that I get paid. Otherwise, hell, I can hate myself all by myself. I don't need anyone else to help me do it.

TV writer Rob Long quotes an unnamed producer whose adage is, "I never take a no from someone who doesn't have the authority to give me a yes." Seems reasonable. So why would I want to join a writers' group and make other people feel bad about their own projects? I can't help them get published.

And what the hell do I know? When I'm not working on my own projects, I can be found working on someone else's books being published by my clients, and I think about 90% of the novels would never see the light of day if it were up to me. Nine percent of the remaining 10% would have to be reworked to death. But they're all getting published, and by some big publishers, so again, what the hell do I know? 

In the best-case scenario, the group does make your work better, and you get published, and you're the breakthrough one who has to try to get all your friends published, too. Plus, you have to list them along with every human being you've ever encountered in the acknowledgments or the dedication. 

Long story short: I don't want to join a writers' group. However, the friend who invited me has been my pal for like 25 years and sends us cookies every Christmas. So you never want to hurt a friend that good.

Oh, well. Mom wanted me to be a lawyer. Maybe I should have listened.

Catch as catch catechism.

This will probably be of no interest to you non-Catholics, so I'll be as brief as I can. The topic says something about the Church, yes, but also about yours truly and his ability to commit. 

On January 1, Ascension Presents started a new podcast/video series called Catechism in a Year. Last year they did a Bible in a Year series, which I had wanted to follow but never did. This year I am all in. 

Everyone knows what the Bible is; the catechism is more easily dismissed as the Catholic Church list of do's and don'ts. Since I was not Catholic growing up and did not have to spend my days being beaten by nuns (we just beat one another up instead), I don't have the dismissiveness toward the catechism that a lot of cradle Catholics I know do. The word catechism comes from late Latin (duh) via the Greek word katēchēsis, or oral teaching. So, the catechism of the Catholic church is a little light reading, 900+ pages of who we are, how we got this way, and what it all means. 

This series is a much deeper dive into the faith than I've ever done, and I sponsored people through the Rites of Catholic Initiation for Adults program for a few years. 

The Ascension series is hosted by Fr. Mike Schmitz, a campus priest with the University of Minnesota in Duluth and what my Catholic school wife and her schoolmates used to call a Father What a Waste. Meaning, he's way too cute to choose a life of celibacy. 

Before getting involved in Catechism in a Year, I'd followed Fr. Mike's own weekly podcast series for a while, and during the Chinese Death Lockdown we would watch his Sunday Mass online. He is a charismatic, enthusiastic priest, who was once on track marry a female person and become an actor. In fact, he was up for the part of Robin in Batman Forever, which means he would have been contracted to play Robin in Batman & Robin with George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which means God took mercy on him and gave him the calling. (I don't know what Chris O'Donnell ever did to deserve that.)

Fr. Mike is a dedicated guy. When he says he's doing these series in one year, he means it -- one 15-20+ minute podcast a day, every single day of the year. He reads and comments on a small portion of the catechism in each episode, and a new one appears to subscribers (all free) every morning. 

I don't know how he recorded all that. I'm finding it hard to keep up. Ideas like listening to the podcast while walking the dog -- something I do daily anyhow -- were rejected, because the topic is complex and requires focus. Best that I sit at the computer, have a copy of the catechism out, and pay attention!!!! Which, as I have the attention span of a toddler, has never been easy. Worse, I rely on caffeine now, which I did not as a toddler, so I may be even more scattered as an adult.

Nevertheless, I am enjoying the education. People may think that the Church does things for cruel or arbitrary reasons, but that's never been the case. It's interesting to learn more about why we believe this and that and where we differ from other faiths and denominations. 

The commitment thing is tough. I've already missed a couple of days and had to double up to get back on track. No idea if I can make it through the whole month, let alone the whole year, but I'll keep trying. I'm much better about staying on mission than trying to regroup and restart later. Wish me luck! 

Horrors of January.

The problem isn't walking the dog. The problem isn't even the cold. The problem is, it's freaking dark out there. 

I'm a morning person, have been since I became a grown-up. No matter how tired I am, or desperate I may be for a nap later, I gotta get up early. And if I'm up, puppy Izzy iz too. And then we have to go explore. Surfin' Sniffari! 

This time of year is the worst. Strange things lurk in the darkness of the morning. Weird, grunting beasts with no name, no language, no tongue known to man. Of course, I'm referring to the teenagers stumbling out of the house for the early bus. On our walks during the day, every kid up to age 13 wants to say hi to the dog, or just look at him; teenagers are surly and don't want anything to do with anything. Black hoodies up, faces shrouded in gloom, they slump off to the corner. 

In the dark, everything looks like a potential menace. Or perhaps something weird, or perverse. Like, I'm pretty sure I saw these shrubs in the original Wicker Man movie: 

What foul monsters lie behind these suburban doors?

Fortunately I have my trusty guard dog with me. He's very brave. Pretty brave. Well, not that brave. Kind of brave. He stood by me through it all, and then got scared of the garbage can back at our own house.

(Note: Unlike our late friend Nipper, Izzy is not scared of all garbage cans; in fact, I have no idea why he panicked that morning upon seeing our recycling bin and nearly took my hand off, bolting for the porch. What goes on in their heads? Anything? HELLLLLO!)

So, what's to do? Well, I comfort myself with the knowledge that the days are getting longer, 30 seconds or so at a time. And I remind myself that the stuff out there really isn't too scary. I always have a flashlight for such dark excursions to ward off bears and the like, and so far all has been well. 

In fact, none of that was really too scary at all, compared to what was waiting for me INSIDE THE HOUSE . . .

Later that morning . . .

When I opened . . .

. . . THE GAS BILL!!!!!!!

😱😱😱😱😱😱

AAIIIIIEEEEE!!!!!

WHO at work?

(Today’s blog entry is brought to you courtesy of guest blogger Theda Blurg, Ph.D., professor of Grievance Studies at Mailen University, whose pronouns are wa/hoo. I give you Dr. Theda.)

🏫🏫🏫

Shut up. 

So I'm riding the road on my electric bicycle because I don't drive some planet-killing machine from hell like you, and I see this:

I would like to hope that this so-called "utility work" was something really utile, like removing all natural gas hookups on the block, but I knew better than to get my hopes up. Then I saw something that was really disgusting -- the most offensive, the most foul, most rank pile of sexism to pop up in front of my face since the all-male remake of Mamma Mia! at the college. 

Can you believe it? MEN WORKING! Not only does this sign debase the contributions of women, but the other 29 genders as well! As if only cisgender, undoubtedly white men ever work! You can almost hear the sneers from those morons as a little girl or trans boy asks if they could grow up to run cable in freezing January weather. "Oh, no, little girly person," they'd say, sneeringly, "this is man's work!"

Of course I immediately ran over to the sign and set it on fire. Well, I tried to, anyway, but I don't use fossil fuels (did you know butane is a fossil fuel? No? You need to do better) and rubbing two sticks was getting me nowhere. I had to make do with kicking it over and doing my cleansing dance of destruction on it, which was such a hit at the library ball last year. Then I spat on it, but I forgot I was wearing my mask. Still, it was satisfying. 

So if you see a sign like this, remember to take action! Sexism, racism, homophobia, all the bad -isms and -obias will only thrive if we don't burn them to the ground! 

🔥🔥🔥

(Thank you, Dr. Theda. I took the liberty of cutting off the last 1,850 words of your essay. And I'd like to thank the example set for me by our federal, state, and local governments, wherein one hires crazy people and celebrates their craziness and then is shocked when they do crazy things.)

Change is good.

 

"It's just that, when you said you were looking for experts in change management,
I thought you meant something different."

All you gorillas.

The Daily Star, Britain's best newspaper for naughty news and using words like "boffin," reports that there may be a clue to the origin of baldy sours like myself, and thus a solution: 

Baldness could soon be cured after boffins discover the 'caveman gene'

Scientists claim that humans are only largely hairless because through evolution we have disabled the 'caveman gene' which would otherwise leave us with a full coat of hair

Sounds promising! 

Boffins reckon they can cure baldness following the discovery of a “caveman gene” which caused our ancestors to grow hair.

They found humans are largely hairless because although we have the genes for a full coat of hair, evolution has disabled them.

Scientists say the breakthrough could lead to ways to regrow hair in bald people, those undergoing chemotherapy or alopecia sufferers.

So now the situation becomes clear. We who suffer from male pattern baldness are not "freaks" or "losers" or "skinheads" or "cue balls" or "glabrous" or "chrome domes" or "chihuahuas" or "tile tops" or "balloon heads" or "necks blowing bubble gum." We're just farther along from the stinking hairy subhuman ancestors than you hairballs are. 

  

A typical meeting of hairy guys

I understand that the hair attracts the ladies more than the lack of hair does. Some chicks have always dug the cavemen. As Joanie Sommers sang in 1962's immortal "Johnny Get Angry," 

Oh, Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad
Give me the biggest lecture I ever had
I want a brave man, I want a cave man
Johnny, show me that you care, really care for me

At least she wasn't asking him to sock her in the nose. 

As we of the lesser-hirsute variety must endure the mockery, out loud or silent, of our fuzzy friends, it's not surprising that we hope for a genuine cure for our polished position. The Star story says that it could be just around the corner, thanks to some other boffins, and links to a piece about Concert Pharmaceuticals' deuruxolitinib, a "selective inhibitor of Janus kinases JAK1 and JAK2." The company announced successful phase 3 trials last November. Apparently it really helped a lot of people, young and old, regrow hair. (No word on whether it made them grow hair on their backs or anything.)

I think it would be lovely to have a pill that would help regrow scalp hair, especially for women who suffer from baldness. For men it can be a trial, but for women it's a disaster. 

I'd like it just because it would help me pass for one of you paleolithic types, which could be useful. But it's not a big deal either way. I have a lot of hats, and I know how to use them. 

Homeworkinator.

The Guardian (because we have to go outside New York for important news about New York) reports that New York City has banned students from using artificial intelligence for schoolwork:

New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.

According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.

The first indication that artificial intelligence was being used was that some actual intelligence was being shown by the students. 

Meanwhile, in artificial intelligence news reported by the New York Post, a group using AI to make dirty pictures has been booted from Kickstarter and Patreon. This was interesting to me, because I thought Kickstarter and Patreon only booted fund-raisers from conservatives. 

But getting back to the school situation. This has gone much differently from what I was expecting as a kid. Take, for example, the kids' book Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, from the series of science fiction books by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams. This 1958 book was still in the library when I was a kid, and it was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The hero, Danny, and his pals are given access to a new supercomputer, which they proceed to use to write their homework for them. But (spoiler alert!) in the end they find that since they had to enter the data for the computer themselves, they wound up learning anyway. Darn you, computer! Making us learn!

The book's authors could not foresee an Internet, a place with so much information so easily within reach. There is still a catch -- a kid who used a computer to retrieve data from the Internet and write his papers would find that his papers contained a lot of garbage information. However, considering its probable nature and the positions of teachers ("January 6 was worse than the Civil War! Herbal supplements can cure cancer! Men can menstruate!"), the kid would probably still get good grades. 

I guess if kids want to get through school and be as ignorant on the other end as they were going in, that's becoming more likely, and for a variety of reasons. I would have warned against that in the past, but as Tommy Grey once wrote, “Where ignorance is bliss, Tis folly to be wise.” Good ol' Tommy, always making with the epigrams. 

Meme Joe Greme.

Yep, we're forced by circumstances to rely on memes again today! But in a way, isn't everything just a meme? Isn't a movie just a long-form meme? Aren’t serial TV shows just one, long, punctuated meme?