Best song I hadn't heard.

When I was looking up some information for the D.B. Cooper item I posted a couple of weeks ago, I came across the curious note that Cooper's skyjacking case and (apparent) escape had inspired a couple of instant records, quick 45s to cash in on the news of the day. This, kids, is what people used to do before throwing together music videos on YouTube for the same purpose. 

While there have been many songs dedicated to the poor parachutist Cooper in the decades since, and even a band named for the felon, at the time one example of the D.B. Cooper genre that popped up on vinyl was by Judy Sword: "D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?" The B side was "Skyjack '71," which is the only one of the two songs I could find on YouTube.

I don't know what became of Ms. Sword, but I do know that her best remembered song was "Please Don't Squeeze My Jimmy" in a piano-hammering blues rock style. But I think the song that should have really put her on the map, the song with one of the best titles I've ever heard, was the B-side of that single, "Take My Love and Shuv It Up Your Heart."

The label left off the "It"

That song was written by one Danny Vest, who recorded it with the Simmons Family. Ms. Sword knew a classic when she heard it, obviously, and covered that sucker. I cannot find her recording, but here's the original, released in 1967, properly spelled:

This could be the love song that the world needs now, with everyone so angry all the time. What better way to say I Love You But Go Away than "Take My Love and Shuv It Up Your Heart"? None, my friends; there is none. Unlike the peculiar case of a lone hijacker, there is a timeless appeal to this poetic phrase. And I think we're all a little wiser now. 

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.

You got me tied down with battleship gray.

A couple of weeks ago I read this item from Smith House Design, posted in 2019, via Instapundit. Smith House is a creative design agency, so a post about color trends is right up their street. And the trend in question is: Battleship.

What is Battleship?

These are the super-dull colors that you’ve seen on cars and trucks in the last couple of years. These are “impossibly dull” versions of blue, gray, and tan. 

 

I guess wherever the author lives they had more new cars than we have around here, because I didn't start notice this until the last six months. And now I see that the "impossibly dull" versions extend to other colors as well. 

It's everywhere. The author predicted that Battleship would remain popular for a while:

Young guys in lifted Toyota Tacomas and Jeeps love the tough look. But don’t expect to see battleship colors in many other places other than automobiles. These super-dull colors are the default choices for common, unexciting products like plastic storage containers, generic PCs, and those big office printers.
     It’s only cool when it is a surprise.

I suppose he's right, but we shall see. He knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. 

However, popular colors reflect the cultural mood. Elevated, dreamlike pastels are popular in periods of optimism; stark colors in periods of conflict. Earth tones seem harmless but reflect a sense of civilizational doom, "back to the farm." Vibrant, blazing colors reflect a sense of excitement and risk. And now we see battleship dullness in a period where people sense that things will be tough, so they want to be tough.

If I'm right, this color trend will extend to house colors, housewares, clothing, and other goods. But the writer may be right, that there is a self-limiting side to dullness because dull things already look dull, and who finds that appealing? 

Still, we can't escape the sense that the national mood is angry -- not a blazing anger, but a kind that is expecting and preparing for the worst, and does not intend to surrender when it comes. Why would they feel this way? Gee, I can't imagine. 

Sunday flagels.

I was buying some bagels at the bagel shop the other day, when I noticed a couple of odd things. 

I don't know what the French toast bagel is like, but since they were sold out, I assume they are pretty good. Maybe another time. They would have been inappropriate for my purposes, though, as we were having bagels and smoked salmon for lunch.

I was more confused by the lower basket, featuring flagels. Never saw them before. What, I wondered, is a flagel? They look kind of flat; is it just a flat bagel?

Yes, pretty much, according to an article in the Village Voice from 2010: 

The flagel is a bagel variation invented by Tasty Bagel in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in 1994.

Basically, it’s a bagel that has been flattened prior to boiling and baking. Why would anyone do that? As you might imagine, bagel bakers get tired of doing the same thing day after day, and maybe the guys at Tasty, which is one of the few bagelries run by Italian-Americans, wanted to do something different to relieve the monotony.

So, there you go. Now, these look like Everything Flagels, since they seem to have no end of stuff on them -- onion and poppy seeds and garlic and sesame seeds and so on. As breakfast baked fads go, this is clearly no Cronut, the bastard child of the croissant and doughnut that swept New York nine years ago. I may be out of touch, and seldom have to go to town anymore, but if the city had been caught up in Flagelmania I think I'd have heard something. 

Maybe I'll get one next time to see what the flagel it is. The Voice piece notes that they tend to go stale quickly, but I never let baked goods sit around here long. However, if the French toast bagels are available, I may have to skip the flagel. Both bagels might be lousy, but maple syrup can cover up a myriad of sins.  

Fred's Book Club: Now You See It.

Welcome once again to the Humpback Writers series, our Wednesday "Hump Day" book feature, where we have a look at all kinds of books. Do the writers actually have humps? No, we believe they do not. In fact, sometimes the books don't even have writers, as is the case today.

Remember these?

Yes, it's the amazing, dazzling 3-D adventure, the Magic Eye! "Stare into these seemingly abstract fields of color (no funny glasses required), and an enchanting 3D image will materialize, all from an abstract, seemingly random field of color!" Or so says the book flap, one of the few bits of the book that really contain writing. 

The trick of the thing is the so-called Salinsky Dot, an image-rendering system that can hide a picture within a picture. There's not a lot of explanation beyond that in the book. To get more information, we can look at a 2019 interview with Magic Eye founder Tom Baccei from AIGA's Eye on Design. It explains some of how the phenomenon works, as developed from research on human's binocular vision: "In the 1960s, [neuroscientist Béla Julesz] pioneered the concept of the random dot stereogram, a visual trick that shows how humans can achieve the sensation of stereopsis, or 3-D vision, by looking at a pair of 2D images filled with randomized, black-and-white dots." Baccei's research into this phenomenon led to the founding of Magic Eye. 

I'm a little reluctant to give true examples from the books, since they're still in print and under copyright. Nor do I want to give away a lot of the answers; half the fun of doing this is discovering what the secret hidden image is. But to give you an idea: Some, like this page, just turn the image you see into a three-dimensional version of the same...

3-D money

While others contain a hidden image you have to look into to perceive.

There's a motorcycle in here somewhere

I'm not sure if you can get the 3-D image from my posted examples, but you can from the Magic Eye Web site (as noted below). 

The books were a craze in the '90s. The ones I have were published by Andrews McMeel in 1993 and 1994, and there were more. According to the Andrews McMeel site, "Magic Eye I, II, and III appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for a combined 73 weeks." More than 20 million copies were sold. And then it went away, or at least fell from the public's -- eye.

As fads go, this was better than most. Maybe the Hula-Hoop was healthier, and the Pet Rock was funnier, and the Fidget Spinner more . . . fidgety, but Magic Eye was more scientific. Plus, it was a lesson in relaxation. To make it work, according to the first book, you should "let the eyes relax, and stare vacantly off into space, as if looking through the image.... Relax and become comfortable with the idea of observing the image, without looking at it." No wonder I sucked at it when I first tried it. It required relaxation, and I spent my entire youth as a nervous wreck. Pretty much true now, too, actually. 

Magic Eye is still around. If you want to try your luck on getting the 3-D image to show, go to the Magic Eye Web site. The image works on the browser almost as well as on printed paper. You can find an instructional page here. 

In addition to its own books, Magic Eye has made books with themes like Harry Potter and Spider-Man. The crew now uses the Magic Eye technology for advertising and promotions as well. There was even a Magic Eye necktie, if you don't mind people staring at your chest with weird, dilated eyes.  

These two books in my collection actually belonged to my mom. She thought it was the most incredible thing. Well, maybe not, but it's not bad.

When it absolutely, positively, has to be....

Overnight what now?

I can't say that I had not heard of overnight oats; as I have written before, I am sometimes called upon to edit cookbooks, including hideous health-nut cookbooks. I've also been to a meeting or two where a woman (always a woman) would be chowing down cold oatmeal from a reusable container. So I knew that putting oatmeal together in the fridge the night before had become a thing.

But is it a thing? Or a Thing? Is it a Thing in the James Arness sense? Or is it okay?

Even though this overnight oat thing is a big boon to Quaker Oats, they have seen where it can be boonier by putting out their own cup of Overnight Oats. As you can see in the picture, it comes with stuff mixed in (raisins, walnuts, and honey flavor here, but there are three other varieties too). You just add milk and shove it in the fridge.

Overnight oat cereal is pretty simple; in fact, Quaker has some recipes on its own site. But this cup o' overnight oats saves you the trouble of putting stuff in (except the milk) and finding the clean Tupperware.

It's interesting, because originally all oats were overnight oats. That's right: oatmeal as food for human consumption used to be cooked all night. Even as late as 1922, according to The Farm Journal ("Most Farmers Prefer Packaged Breakfast Foods" -- no link available), "In summer... oil and gas stoves are substituting for the kitchen range, so that oatmeal cannot simmer all night long, as many people consider necessary."

Modern overnight oats are a lot easier, since they prepare themselves in the fridge and you won't accidentally burn down the house while you're sleeping.

So how are the Quaker Overnight Oats? I tried a couple of flavors, including the above, and my review is: Meh. The oats are really chewy and not in a good way; more like the something-chewed-this-already way. Gummy, actually. The flavor of the honey one was a little weird, and I suspect that comes from using some kind of powdered honey (there's no liquid honey in the cup).

To be fair, though, I wanted to put together a cup of overnight oats from scratch, to see if the texture issue was just this pre-cupped product. Last night I did just that, mixing yogurt and milk with a cup of oats and whatnot (following this recipe, except with raisins for the apple and almond slivers for the chia seeds because, well, chia seeds). Let's eat!

And it's okay. Not gummy. Still weird -- it's cold non-crunchy oatmeal. Takes some acclimation. But better than the ready-mixed product.

So those are my findings. Your mileage may vary, but I suspect this cold oatmeal is a fad that's not going to last long. At least it doesn't involve the words "kale" or "smoothie," which is pretty major.

What's the next bacon?

For years now we've had kale and bacon as the two riders on our diet seesaw. When we want to be virtuous and good, we eat kale; when we want to be naughty and daring, we eat bacon. The main reason for this is that we're idiots.

I'm not going to address kale today, because the subject is too painful for normal discourse. Our obsession with bacon, though, has become somewhat embarrassing. The fact that you can even pretend to be bacon is a little alarming.

"Helllooo, ladies!"

But I think the bacon thing may be fading. We've put it in everything, we've wrapped everything in it. We've lumped it in piles to make things that bacon was never meant to be. Where else is there to go? It's time to find a new naughty food. Not something that is itself a composed food, like Twinkies; it has to be something that is more of an ingredient, but may be eaten alone.

Here are some naughty food suggestions, since I am always full of naughty suggestions:

Confectioners' sugar: Like bacon, you find it in all kinds of things. Like bacon, it is daring, because it's bad for you. It can be sprinkled, like bacon, or used to cover things decadently. All it needs is some cool variations, like chipotle confectioners' sugar.

Spam: Pushes the bacon meme one step further. Still not kosher. And it has the approval of Hawaiians, who are hip. Many Asian cultures dig the Spam, too. It can be used in almost any dish that has diced, sliced, or ground meat. And hard-core hipsters can argue about the virtues of classic Spam vs. Treet, Snack, Prem, Mor, or more exotic canned meat like Vienna sausage or potted meat or chicken bologna.

Pretty out there.

Carolina reapers: Bacon promises a slow death; the Carolina reaper, the world's hottest pepper at 1,569,300 Scovil heat units (until something more psychotic comes along), will send you to the hospital much sooner. So it has that going for it.

Anchovies: As once was the case with bacon, anchovies have lingered in an almost forgotten old-folks food realm; anchovies, in fact, are in the neighborhood of clam juice and canned chicken a la king. Any smart chef could start whipping out gourmet canned anchovies, and we're on our way.

Pickles: Like bacon, very very salty, but unlike bacon, not fatty. Still, lots of gourmet potential. Pickles are a couple of university studies---showing their dangerous qualities---from being very big. And I'm sure they have dangerous qualities. Every food, when studied hard enough, proves to have dangerous qualities.

Lard: Just cut to the chase. We could fool around with shortening, but c'mon---break out the lard. Twenty years ago strong young people would faint at the sight of a bucket of Armour Lard. Now it's starting to weasel its way back, because it imparts flavor to food like nothing else, except maybe bacon grease. Lard itself is not great for eating, true, although after ear gauges I'm not sure what people won't sink to. Hipster lard may be on the horizon.

All these would make excellent substitutes for the coming collapse of bacon. But I wouldn't count bacon out just yet. There's a lot of life still in those pork bellies.

"Fry me to the moon, big boy."