At City Market yesterday I was impressed by the proliferation of hot sauces available to use in flavoring our food. As far as this product is concerned we seem to be in a golden age. Every year the number of choices grows, way too fast for me to attempt to sample them all.
Although I didn’t count the offerings at that visit, there must have been more than a hundred of them to pick from. The labels of many boasted about their pepper of origin and how unbearable they were and what havoc they would soon be wreaking on your body. There were jalapeño sauces, habanero sauces, serrano sauces, ghost pepper sauces, Scotch Bonnet sauces, Carolina Reaper sauces, etc.
It is likely that none of them convey the full fury of the pepper to one’s gastrointestinal tract. The pepper power is usually considerably diluted in making the product you find on those shelves. The full experience of ingesting an untamed Carolina Reaper, for instance, is enjoyed by a very few of the hardiest of souls. And as my grandmother might have said, they may not be quite right in the head.
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Robin and I went with friends to see A Complete Unknown, and it was the second time for us. Double awesome. On a Wednesday night in Paradise the theater was nearly filled, with the hair color of most of the attendees being gray. That is testament to the drawing power of Dylan and his music. This was, after all, just a movie about him, and covered only a short handful of years in his career.
BTW. When Bob left the Iron Range of Minnesota and stopped for a while in Minneapolis, he rented a room above Gray’s Drug in the Dinkytown area, just off the university campus. At one brief moment in my otherwise unremarkable life I too, stayed for a few days in a room over Gray’s Drug.
It wasn’t the same room that Dylan had occupied but hey, his was just down the hall. And my occupancy was many years after he had left for New York, but … let’s not quibble … I was that close to greatness.
Even more of this unbelievableness. He and I attended the University of Minnesota at the same time, and you know, he has never once mentioned me in any of his songs or interviews. If you ask him he may use the excuse that there were 35,000 other students attending that school at the same time, but that’s pretty weak, really. I guess when you get to the top you forget about the little people … .
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Our new/old POTUS, in one of his first official acts, pardoned everybody that participated in the January 6 insurrection, which he calls a festival. The sacrifices the capitol police made in protecting members of Congress are ignored or made light of. The Fraternal Order Of Police must be rethinking their support for Cluck in his three runs for the presidency. What the FOP might have easily known, if they had looked just a little deeper, is that loyalty is a one-way street for Cluck.
While I am all in favor of reducing prison populations, I would humbly suggest that first we let out everyone who is completely innocent. This would free up an estimated 4-6% of the prison population right there.
If we were making a list, there are many other groups more deserving of clemency than the traitors of January 6. We could have saved those bozos for last.
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From The New Yorker
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February is now officially within striking distance, with only 5 days of January to go. Not that February is any great shakes as a month, typically being the coldest of the year in these parts. And it only has a single holiday, one devoted to Hallmark Card’s version of romantic love, which has been shown over a very long time to have some serious holes in its implementation. If it were not for the unholy quartet of greeting card sellers, florists, jewelers, and candy makers, Valentine’s Day might have long ago been disposed of in history’s dustbin.
But I digress. The best thing about the month of February is that it has fewer days than all the rest. Because to get to good ol’ windy, rainy, unpredictable March is our goal. March is where the annual battle between weather we really like and the basket of deplorables* that constitutes Winter is fought.
There is a certain odor in the air that defines Autumn for me, and that is the lovely scent of dried and decaying leaves everywhere. Early spring also has its distinctive odor and it is of all the dog poop thawing that has been left behind by our friends at the IRCOA (Irresponsible Canine Owners of America). This is the perfume of March.
*I know you’ve heard this phrase somewhere before … somewhere.
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Robin and I finished a limited series on Netflix last night, and it was a relief to do so. The series was “American Primeval,” and we’re not quite sure why we stuck with it. Here’s a selection from a review in The Guardian.
American Primeval emerges as a study of human nature at its desperate best and unbridled worst, the whole existential mess parching beneath the sun like pegged-out animal skins. The wild west never looked so wild, nor as nasty, broken and desolate. Halfway though, I’m engrossed, but also genuinely shocked. Don’t watch it if you can’t take violence. Just don’t.
And that quote was taken from a positive review, one that gave the show four out of five stars.
The main protagonists are the Utes, the Mormon church, the U.S. Army, and a ragtag bunch of settlers, trappers, and mountain scroungers. None of these groups conduct themselves well. Everybody is freezing, eneryone needs a bath very badly, and everyone is functioning with mostly their lizard brains. The weather ranges from simply bleak and windy to blizzards. The violence is off most charts.
And yet we finished it. Perhaps we saw some truth worth learning there. About what frontier life really might have been. Brutal, dirty, bloody, and often short. Being on the frontier was probably a lot less tidy than what Little House on the Prairie presented.
Our review: Interesting story but awfully grim in the telling. No comic relief in sight. Not a guffaw or a pratfall in the entire series.
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Where did this guy come from? I totally did not see him coming. Country grunge with thoughtful lyrics, great guitar playing, passé thrift shop clothing and scraggly hair? In this song he is reminiscing about a milestone year in his adolescence. I can relate to much of it without half-trying.
(I learned that he was/is a Nirvana fan and there is a tiny musical quote in this video at 012-018 from Nirvana’s recording of All Apologies.)
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Ole was hired to paint the yellow stripe down the highway. His first day, his boss handed him a brush and a can of paint and Ole painted ten miles. The second day he only painted five.
His boss, thinking that he was getting slower because he had started off too hard on the first day, decided to give him a day off to rest. But when Ole came back to work the next day, he only painted half a mile.
So his boss asked, “Excuse me, but why have you been painting less and less each day, even after I gave you a day off?”
“Well, ” Ole answered. “I’m getting further from the can!”
(It’s been a long time since I’ve subjected anyone to an Ole and Lena joke. Figured it was catch-up time.)
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Little Home In The Valley 