Poor Tupperware. All they wanted to do was make durable little boxes for us to put our stuff in, and they did this awfully well for 78 years. When they started out, plastic was our bright and shiny new friend. But now … Chapter 11 bankruptcy is coming for the company.
There have been rumors for years that the company was in trouble. Plastic in any form has been a no-no for environmental reasons for quite a while, but when those micro-particles began showing up in male genitalia I knew that the handwriting was definitely on the wall.
After all, no matter how well those lids will seal or those containers stack, who wants to trade convenient food storage for a polystyrene penis?
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From The New Yorker
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It’s pretty obvious that Cluck and mini-Cluck don’t talk much. After the recent affair at the golf course, Vance went to work accusing Democrats of using inflammatory words like fascist and thereby inciting these unbalanced assassins. All the while Cluck is out there repeatedly calling Harris “fascist and communist.”
I’m not a very good political scholar but I’m not even sure you can be a fascist and a communist at the same time. However, making sense has never been Cluck’s strong suit, has it?
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A serious note. Yet another study reporting the Times on Thursday about alcohol’s strong links with various cancers, especially bowel and liver. Yet nearly every month we have a wine and cheese something or other here in Paradise. Every fund-raising organizer makes sure that the alcohol supplies don’t run low or who will come to their event?
As a society we have come to grips with tobacco, another potent carcinogen, and life is better for having done so. We’ve only started with alcohol, but the present social modeling certainly isn’t being helpful. (In how many photos taken at “galas” do the celebrants not have a drink in their hands?)
So far we’ve only really dealt with one obvious negative consequence of drinking, which is driving while intoxicated. We need to get serious about alcohol’s other public health impacts with the same energy that we brought to those of tobacco.
The famous social experiment that was Prohibition was an utter disaster. But education and enlightened leadership could be the way forward.
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Still none of those beautiful overflights by Canada geese and sandhill cranes. The leaves of the trees, however, have definitely received the message that Fall is here. Our evening lows are all in the 40s and the mornings are crisp and cool. It’s nice to shiver ever so slightly when you step out on the deck in your bathrobe with a coffee cup in hand. Life can be good.
I tried to make a quiche the other day, including making the crust from scratch. The recipe indicated that the crust be called “savory” rather than “flaky,” and that was exactly the case. What the recipe left out, however, was that the crust was also nearly hard enough to use to level uneven table legs.
This episode reminds me of the time when I tried to bake unleavened bread. Lord knows why I was even interested, but my attempts to follow the Israelites’ recipe didn’t turn out as planned.
I mixed up the dough, and then as instructed I left it out in the room for a day or two to gather yeasts from the air. At the end of that time there was no evidence that the loaf had risen. Not at all. But being an optimistic sort I put it in the oven for the prescribed length of time, and out came a nice brown loaf.
What happened next was this. I wanted a slice of the bread to eat while it was still warm enough to melt the butter. But the loaf was so rock-hard that I could not cut it. First I used a slicing knife, then a serrated blade … nothing doing. I tried to stab it with a dagger without even making a dent. In desperation I got out an ice pick, which turned out to be yet one more useless thing to do.
So the loaf sat there unmoved by my efforts, all the while still looking like food, which by now I had concluded it was not. Once this brick was cool enough, I tossed it out into the back yard, where I kept two healthy husky dogs. Nice big dogs with nice big teeth. They were able to eat it, but it took the two of them three days to gnaw it down. How Moses and those Israelites made it through the desert was now even more of a mystery to me than it had been.
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From The New Yorker
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Little Home In The Valley 