Fall, schmall.

Everyone says summer is great, but they can't seem to kick it out the door fast enough after Labor Day. 

Never mind the Halloween candy in July -- that's a lost cause, and I think lost because we just like excuses to buy sacks of little candies and eat them and then have to replace them. The stores would put them out in March if they thought they wouldn't look like they'd been left over since last Halloween. And it's not like little candies in big sacks aren't available year-round. It's just that the variety is better at Halloween, and we can convince ourselves we're being festive! and not gluttons. These are for the kids! Yeah, that bag will have been reduced to a pile of little wrappers and human waste before October even starts. 

Well, today is the first day of fall, and as usual, the stores have been all-out for Halloween for weeks, beyond the candy. Labor Day: School supplies out, Halloween crap in. Like this, at CVS:

I'm calling the exterminator

You're not even trying to not be
a Christmas tree, are you?

The weird thing, my neighbors started following the trend. Usually no one puts out Halloween stuff before October 1 -- maybe a generic scarecrow or something that could be just a general autumn decoration, but "Boo"? Foo.

But one product has already got a jump on Christmas, and it is not whom I'd have expected. Sure, my wife's craft catalogs start with Christmas in spring, but they know people need time to make serious projects. And yeah, I've seen ads for some Christmas events like the Rockefeller Center show in the city and the invitation to waste the holidays and your savings at Disney, but people always plan trips months ahead. But a Christmas-themed cereal box in September?

The answer of course is General Mills' sponsorship with Hallmark Channel, home of a million Christmas movies. My sources tell me that the channel is running 31 new movies this year, starting on October 20, so you'd better believe they're ready for autumn to be on its way and get us thinking Yuletide thoughts. 

As usual, I feel like I just took the tree down. Can we push Christmas off till April 2024? Is that too much to ask? I’m not ready.

Shooting at the influenza, bang bang.

My doctor is still missing, as I reported before Christmas, but rather than sell his practice, he has his office making referrals to a nurse practitioner. Well, this damned sciatica is cramping my style something fierce, so I made an appointment to see her.

I have nothing against nurses, or NPs, but when you're in pain you kind of want a full-fledged doctor. However, when you're in a lot of pain, you kinda want anyone. If the insurance company said I had no option but to see a fourteen-year-old chiropractor and his sidekick, a Chihuahua named Mister Barks, I'd give it a shot.

My concerns were quickly dismissed by the professionalism of the NP in question, and after all, I wasn't there to have a railroad spike surgically removed from my temporal lobe; this was simply a call for discussion and referral to a physical therapist, as I anticipated. Also some muscle relaxants to help me stop yelping like Mister Barks every time I roll over in my sleep. Of course, while I was there I was offered a flu shot, and I figured okay, why the heck not.

Like a lot of people, I don't usually bother getting the flu shot unless I happen to be in the doctor's office and it's offered to me. It's the "You want fries with that?" of modern healthcare. Every year we seem to hear how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention really, honestly almost nailed the viruses chosen for the vaccine this time, but were juuuuust a little outside, and so now everyone's sick, even the ones who got the flu shot. It doesn't really happen that way, but that's how it sounds in the press.

Skeptic that I am -- not about vaccines in general but about the efficacy of the flu shot -- I have been taking the idea more seriously this year anyway. Why? Because the CDC makes an excellent point, that when a (mostly) healthy and (kinda) strong and (not so) young and (perhaps) manly man like myself gets the flu, it might just be a bad couple of days off and no big deal -- but I could accidentally spread it to people who have weakened immune systems, or who are very young or very old, and that would be bad. If I get the shot, it is that much less likely I will become Typhoid Freddy.

Also, and more selfishly, "even when the match is not perfect, flu vaccine still reduces the risk of severe illness and death," reports Harvard Health. I have seen in the news that if I get a different strain of the flu, the symptoms and duration may still be lessened by having the shot. Good enough for me, especially since there are fears that this may be an especially severe flu season before it's all over.

So if you're in the United States and you are not on the don't-shoot list, I suggest you get the shot if you haven't. You can get it at CVS, and they'll even give you a complimentary gigantic receipt to remember the day. You can use it as a throw blanket! Win-win!

Stroop to conquer.

A few years ago I noted the potential menace of the stroopwafel, as purveyed to an unsuspecting public by an outfit called Belgian Boys. Well, the Boys are still around, with more products than ever, trying to bring America under the heel of Brussels. 

But wait! Another stroopwafel has entered the fray! 

Stroop! There it is!

Daelmans is also selling prepackaged stroopwafels -- this one came from a CVS, the chain drugstore that's awfully concerned about our health, which means this must be health food, right?

Well, no, which means that our already blubbery populace is being attacked by easily edible stroopwafels. Which begs the question:

What the heck is a stroopwafel?

Stroop is Dutch for syrup, but Dutch is the main language in both Belgium and the Netherlands. Wikipedia says that stroopwafels are "a waffle made from two thin layers of baked dough with a caramel syrup filling in the middle." Well, they certainly look like what we consider waffles, but what this is is a cookie, and a supercookie at that -- huge and layered and filled with caramel goodness. Wikipedia also says "Stroopwafels are popular in the Netherlands, and were first made in the city of Gouda."

Wait -- Netherlands? Not Belgium, as the Belgian Boys would have is believe?

Nay! says Daelmans, which started making stroopwafels in Vlijmen, Netherlands, in 1909.

So now I'm thinking we're not the victim of a single foreign attack, but rather we're the battleground between Belgium and the Netherlands. Yes, we are in the peril of a proxy war between these tiny titans of Europe. Who will win America with their stroopy deliciousness?

As of now, I am pulling for the Netherlands. I liked the Belgian Boys stroopwafel a lot, but I give the edge to Daelmans, which was more solid and had more flavorful caramel. Should I even choose sides in such a fight?

Yes, when it tastes that good.

A seasonal induglence.

How many times do I have to tell everybody?

HIRE AN EDITOR AND YOU WON'T LOOK STUPID!

At least hire a proofreader.

This was a flyer I received in the mail from CVS, the Pride of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, #7 on the Fortune 500 list as of last June, the drugstore giant that pulled in more than $177.5 billion in sales (according to Hoovers). And yet with all that dough, all that moolah, all that Social Security money in their Scrooge McDuck-like vaults, they couldn't cough up fifty bucks to get a professional editor to look at this so they could spell INDULGE correctly.

This is a black eye for you, CVS, and I am doubly disappointed since just a few months back, in January, I mentioned how proud I was that you could spell stationery properly (meaning the paper stuff).

And yet I have had to take you to the woodshed before, CVS. In 2014, when I was posting on my old (now defunct and inaccessible) blog, you stopped selling cigarettes because (you said) you were so concerned about our health. I called you on your hypocrisy, on your attempt to get grace on the cheap. Not that I smoked at that time or since, not for quite a few years now, but I pointed out that you continue to sell candy, all the time, every day; there's a section of the store that's just candy, the seasonal aisle always has candy, and of course the checkout area is candy out the bazooty. (Never mind the snack aisle, which is very cookie-centric.) And I wondered if you were willing to cut off all that revenue, even though diseases of obesity are going to kill far more of us than diseases of smoking, and now our fatness is "astronomical," and even more out of control than it was in 2014. Heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer.... Well, CVS? Are you going to chase out the lardbuckets the way you chased out the puffers?

AND YOU COULDN'T EVEN PAY SOME POOR EDITOR A FEW DOLLARS TO SPELL A FLYER RIGHT, A FLYER BY THE WAY THAT WAS ADVERTISING CANDY?

Now, about your complicity in the rampant and deadly opioid drug epidemic that you're only just now addressing...

$177.5 billion and they can't hire a proofreader. Sheesh.