No-No Paleo! Yes-Yes Retreo!

Yes, boys and girls, when you get old you do start to fall apart.  In my case, the digestion faltered, and I was forced to change my diet.  This led me to Dr. Google's colleague, the great nutritionist in The Cloud, and my head began to spin.  Eventually,  I settled on a classic bland diet that seemed strangely familiar.

You've heard of the trendy Paleo "caveman" lifestyle with meat, meat, meat and no processed food on the menu? I found I was living the Retreo lifestyle, where the more processed the food is, the better.

As I overcooked my green beans and plopped them on a plate of naked chicken breast, with a side of white rice, I felt like I had been sucked into a wormhole and spit out into my mother's kitchen, circa 1957.  The gang was all there:  Little Miss Sunbeam, the Blue Bonnet Lady, Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Snap Crackle Pop. Welcome back, daughter!  Permission granted to eat white bread, white flour, Jell-o, and mushy carrots. Permission granted to turn up your nose at broccoli, cauliflower, and kale.

I hope that slice is slathered with Blue Bonnet Margarine because
"Everything's better with Blue Bonnet on it."

For a while the diet was good transgressive fun. The devil says eat the white bread, the angel says eat the multigrain.  I got to hang with the devil.  True, cooking in was boring and eating out was a challenge since "land that time forgot" restaurants--where the rolls are squishy and the lettuce is all iceberg, all the time--are few and far between in this part of the world.


But there are two versions of Retreo--Mom's Kitchen and Galivanting Gourmet--as I found when I consulted my favorite vintage cookbooks:  The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places, Volumes 1 and 2.  Dating from the very early 1950's, and given out as inducements to test drive a new Ford, they were designed, no doubt, to elicit a Pavlovian drool as you ran to the garage, hopped in your new Ford and drove fifty miles for a swell meal.  Reading through I realized that the most dramatic revolution I've lived through has not been technological, but culinary.

What's on the menu?  How about an appetizer of Banana Meat Rolls (all you Paleo people, hold the roll), followed by an entree of Opossum, Roasted and Stuffed (with bread stuffing, not taxidermy fluff).  Don't forget  a side of Walpole Woodchuck Relish.  Alas, the relish contains no woodchucks, only cabbage, green peppers, sour pickles, a can of pimentos and some seasonings.

If those items don't appeal you can choose between five versions of Lobster Thermidor, three Sweetbreads presentations and six bowls of Clam Chowder, but why bother when you can order Roast Vermin.

You could opt for  a salad, but fair warning, the dressing will contain either tomato soup or its cousin ketchup/catsup or canned pineapple, possibly both.  If you like your pineapple without tomato sauce, you might choose the Holiday Salad, either the Jello-O mold version or the lettuce version: canned pineapple rings colored with red and green food coloring, cinnamon flavor for the red and peppermint for the green, laid out on crisp lettuce leaves and garnished with mayonnaise.  The only fresh pineapple in the book was used as a pincushion for toothpicked tidbits of shrimp and cheese. Oh, the glamour.

What's up with all that canned pineapple?  My first cookbook, which was a kid's cooking thing, included a recipe for Flagpole Salad, which featured a vertical banana jammed on a canned pineapple ring.  Maybe the folks at Dole were especially good at product placement, and dropped off crates of rings, chunks, and crushed bits on the doorstep of every eating place in the country.

"Fat" was not often specified, so anything went: bacon drippings, lard, butter, oleo, Crisco, Wesson Oil, or axle grease. For the Ancient Barbecue Sauce you need tallow (beef or mutton fat rendered from suet) and an otherwise modern sounding recipe for Guacamole calls for mayonnaise (not enough fat in the avocados?) and green food coloring (for St. Patrick's Day?)

Dessert will be cream pie: coconut, banana, chocolate, chocolate rum, coffee, lemon, mint, lime, pineapple and three versions of unspecified flavor "cream."  There are very few chocolate desserts, but there is a Tomato Soup Cake that I remember appeared regularly at Ma's Eating Place.

I had a hard time choosing which recipe to include here, but when I came across the following vegetable dish, I though immediately of my sister Maureen.

CHEESE BEAN A LA FALLHALL

2 cans yellow wax beans

Butter

Brown sugar

White Sauce

1/2 cup grated cheese

1/2 cup aged cheese

I'm sure you can guess that it hails from Wisconsin, and I think you can guess how the ingredients get assembled and baked, but you probably didn't know how to make the aged cheese: dry cheese, grate it until very fine, and pack in glass jars.  It keeps indefinitely and has a fine tang. I'll just bet it does.

I know that I can't count on my sister to be in the same room as, let alone prepare, this tempting treat, so it won't be on the menu on the  Trouserville table this Thanksgiving.  While not traditional fare, the recipe for Upside-Down Fudge Cake in Volume Two does sound pretty good and that could make a guest appearance. So hop in the Ford and drive on up on the 27th of November to find out.

In the meantime, skip on over to read Maureen's blog post Gag Me with a Spoonful of Creamed Corn to understand her aversions to wax beans,  with a side of turnip and creamed spinach.

American Hairdo

Saw a fun movie the other night.  I think it was called American Hairdo (or Two Years  A Hairpiece or Gravity Defying Body Parts or something). It was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, but snubbed in the hairdo and make-up category, go figure!

Anyhow, it was all about this glued-on toupee with a combover who is married to an up-do with a side of baloney curls, but the combover is also having a relationship with a Charlie's Angels shoulder length wave redhead. The combover and the wave are in cahoots as genuine fake-loan con artists, with the added attraction of the wave's breast-baring daytime business attire. The wave faux-cheats on the combover with a fake-perm with prosthetic tooth veneers and a beard and mustache who works for the FBI. 

Authentic Charlie's Angel

Anyhow, the toupee-combover is an authentic con man and the fake-perm is a manic FBI agent who snags the combover and the shoulder length wave in the act of real-scamming and gets them to set up a faux-scam involving a number of regular-boys' haircuts, one gigolo side bang, a slicked-back sleaze-head, a schmatte-wearing hair-hiding faux Arab, and a pair of Junior Soprano eyeglasses.

In the middle of all this is a well-meaning but corrupt Elvis pompadour who is the mayor of a New Jersey city, and number of his connections:  Grecian Formula political heads. 

There's not a lot of diversity, but in one scene the corrupt Elvis pompadour does have his arm around an Al Sharpton Afro, but we never see one Jheri Curl at all. (Where are you now, Super Freak?)

Everything ends up swell for some: the combover and the wave move in together, the up-do and the side-bang move in together.  None of them get killed or go to jail.  On the other hand, the rubber-curler faux perm from the FBI is real-conned by the combover and the wave and ends up in disgrace. The Grecian formula political heads and the Elvis pompadour end up fined or in jail. We don't find out what happens to the Afro.

Along the way (not in scenic order):  a science oven (microwave oven) explodes on account of the up-do sticking a foil-wrapped metal baking pan inside it; the wave and the faux-perm go disco dancing at Studio 54 where they do the Hustle and have faux-sex in a toilet stall; the Elvis pompadour and the combover lip-synch to Delilah; the faux-perm's Mamma Mia dishes out some gratuitous cliches with the cannoli; one huge fat middle-aged male belly gets an entire scene to itself as well as a cameo at the pool party (but you can go Google that yourself).

I like to think of myself as a 60's gal, but now that I think of it, I did spend more of my adult years in the 70's.  Care to join me as I drown my aged sorrows in an iconic fern-bar cocktail? Harvey Wallbangers all around, bartender.

Foc.us? Foc.me!

No Forks in the Sockets
No Beans in your Ear
No Pistachio Nuts in your Nose
ETC.

Don't we all need a jumpstart for our brains now and again? I do, especially when faced with a task like balancing the checkbook or finding the jack-o-lantern candleholder that I tucked away last Halloween.

But, don't we all remember our mothers telling us not to stick a fork in an electric socket?

If Ma were around today she'd be telling us not to stick electrodes into our brains.  Ma's no longer here so Trouserville will pick up the megaphone:  don't go sticking electrodes into your brains.

 In other words: no self-administered transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

BEFORE tDCS

AFTER DIY tDCS

Yes, we are living in the future where scientific information  (much of it half-baked or in this case, half-fried) is freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

There has been real research by real scientists in real universities to determine whether tDCS can help re-carve neural pathways for those with Parkinson's disease, for example. There are some indications that this may work, though some of the researchers  have fessed up to forehead burns. 

Enter the FDAWW (Future Darwin Award Winners of the World) who have taken this preliminary research and run straight to the hardware store with it. You can see them on You Tube hooking up 9-volt batteries to wires and sticking the wires into their brains.  Not as a Mr. Wizard science project they hope will get them an A, or because they are dressing up like Frankenstein for Halloween. No, they are trying to enhance their video gaming ability.  Duh! Double Duh! and a hearty WTF.

If you aren't the DIY type there's a company in the UK who will sell you a device  with the classy moniker Foc.us, for about $250.  I haven't checked it out, but it sounds like a gussied up version of the classic tin-foil head wrapper beloved of cranks everywhere. You might have to get on a waiting list, though,  since the first production run of 3,000 sold out faster than you can say scalp burns.

I guess there are a lot of people out there who listen neither to their mothers, nor to the inner voice that is shrieking "Sucker!"










If you want to read more about it check out Jump-Starter Kits for the Mind which appeared in the New York Times Science Section on October 28, 2013.  I know you have enough brain power to just click right through the advertisement that pops up first.

McStemCell's

Yummers!

Scientists have managed to grow enough stem cell beef to make a couple of patties--to the tune of over $300,000--so I guess it won't be anytime soon that engineered burgers will be on the fast food menus of the world. I wouldn't read this report  on an empty stomach, or a full one, either.  Burgers with a "yellowish tinge" even though they've been tinted with beet juice? No, thanks. 


Of course, these were scientists in the UK, and it probably seemed like a good idea after all that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy going around a few years back.

Makes me happy that I am old enough to have eaten any number of juicy, thick, medium-rare burgers (accompanied by fries cooked in beef fat) without one iota of guilt and old enough that I won't be force-fed lab meat at the Sundowners' Club.

I don't know why this mystery meat seems more disgusting than any other edible.  If you've ever worked in a restaurant, studied a nutrition label on a salty snack, or read any of the scary bestsellers about the food chain, you know what I mean. Want to supersize that pink slime?

However, the test tube beef is getting a bit too sci-fi even for me.  I'm old and my head is filled up with all kinds of cultural rubbish, so all I can think of is a bloodied and battered Charlton Heston searching the back alleys of The Future (New York in 2022 which looks a lot like Kabul 2012) to find the secret* of the "tasteless, odorless crud" that passes for food:  Soylent Green.

*Spoiler alert:  it begins with the letter "P" and rhymes with "Creeple."

Medieval Teenage Assassin Nuns

My high school summer reading list was never like this: in Brittany in the late1400's a young girl escapes from an arranged marriage to a violent lout and is taken in by the Convent of St. Mortain (yes, that is "mort" as in "death") where she is trained as an assassin and then, disguised as a courtesan, sent on missions to save Brittany from the French by poisoning, knifing, and otherwise dispatching villains who've been fingered by Mother Superior.  

My English teacher, Sister St. Sourpuss, would be having a conniption fit, for oh, so many reasons. 

And here's something else to send her into a tailspin: I don't have to lug the book around getting sand and soda pop all over it, I can stick it in my ear, courtesy of Audiobook Sync which pairs a modern Young Adult novel with a classic and distributes them during the summer, courtesy of the publisher's marketeers. I just finished listening to the recent selection blurbed above, Grave Mercy,(Volume 1 of the  His Fair Assassin Trilogy, by Robin LaFevers) which is paired with a full cast recording of Hamlet. 


I know that I often climb aboard my ancient flivver of doom to spew nostalgia all over the 21st century, but here's a case in which things have clearly improved.  Yes, teenage nun assassins are a bit extreme but, hey, this is actually a fairly well-researched historical novel about the court of Anne de Bretagne, and I applaud stories about young women on a high stakes heroine's journey that doesn't end with a date for the prom.  It sure beats the crap out Cherry Ames, Department Store Nurse or Donna Parker, On Her Own which were considered appropriate "free reading" back in the day.  To those gals the mystery of the missing bracelet or a bad hair day were as challenging as it got. As for the assigned summer reading which included such gems as Mrs. Mike, all I can say is who would you rather read about: a bad-ass medieval assassin girl swanning around court in fancy dress  or a Mountie's wife swatting blackflies and rabid raccoons in East Overshoe, Canada? 

Don't tell Sister St. Sourpuss, but I'm off to order the next of His Fair Assassins, Dark Triumph.

"Go To Jail, Go Directly To Jail, Do Not Pass Go,

Do Not Collect $200!"


Back in the day there were no sweeter words in the world. Your Monopoly opponent drew the dreaded Jail Card and had to sit out a turn while you gloated and scurried to advance your own agenda.







Sorry, kids, no longer will you experience that particular thrill of schadenfreude, at least while playing the updated Monopoly Empire, Own the World's Top Brands. According to Hasbro's website Mo-Emp's neatsy-keen features are:

Buy and trade the world's top brands and be first to the top!

Cool brand tokens

Fast, fun gameplay

Watch the Monopoly Empire towers rise and fall

Yes, kids, you can spend your increasingly rare free time striving for world domination through consumer products. How patriotic! And how much fun will you have watching those towers rise and fall? Lots, I'll bet, since you are probably too young to equate towers falling with the fruits of jihad. No worries, though, since we are talking fast, fun gameplay there will be no jail.  

That's right, a no-holds-barred quest for power with no pesky time-outs for bad behavior or bad luck. A dream come true.

Much as I would like remain on the soapbox about the ethical subtext of eliminating the Jail Card, I won't.  I have some sympathy for those traditional game makers who have to concern themselves with "snackability." New games, or versions of old favorites, have to be quick enough to play in the ten-minutes of downtime a child might have between etiquette lessons and vocabulary boot camp. (You can read more about this in the recent Wall St. Journal article Toys for Tight Schedules.)

Unless you owned the Monopoly set, you
 were never ever in a million billion years
going to get to use the Scottie dog or the
racing car. 

I have no nostalgia for those cute little Monopoly tokens of yesteryear, (oh, okay, maybe the iron), and even back in the day the plutocratic Monopoly Man was a bit dated.  The battle against product placement everywhere has everywhere been lost. Time-stressed multi-tasking is a way of life even for toddlers. We all live in Snack World.






But it seems a little sad that a lot of today's kids just don't have the time, even if they had the inclination, to loll about on an old blanket in someone's backyard and play Monopoly for hours. Yes, kids, there was a time when the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" meant sugar-soaked fun, when sun tan lotion was meant to attract rays not repel them, and when "Go directly to jail," didn't sound like the tagline for yet another TV show.

A My Name is . . .

Abercrombie? Absinthe? Aflatoxin? Aqueduct? Amoeba?

Well, it could be worse. The product, uh, offspring, of celebrities Kanye West and Kim Kardashian has been given the reality-TV-ready name of "North."  That would be "North West." Duh! She will be called "Nori," which as a type of seaweed is nicer than "Noro," a type of intestinal virus. As her parents have announced, she is their very own little "North Star," and they pose the question, "What is higher than North?" Hmm-mm--mm, I think we can all fill in that blank. At least they didn't succumb to a "K" name. Kaopectate West doesn't have quite the same cutesy ring as "North (Nori-don't-call-me-sushi) West."

N my name is Nori and I need nothing.

I won't be the first or the last to scratch my head over the names that folks, celebrity and non, give to their children. Look, call yourself whatever you want, but have some pity on your kids.

Back in the day, if you were born Catholic as I was, you couldn't be baptized unless you were given the name of a saint.  "Kathleen" was a form of "Katherine," and there are a couple of saints with some form of that name, so that was fine. Fortunately, there was no way I could have been named "Kapok" or "Kwashiokor," even if my parents were the kind of narcissistic louts who would do something like that.  My only complaint was that "Kathleen" was one of the most popular names (#11 in the top 20) the year I was born, not quite the Sophia-Emma-Isabella-Olivia-Ava of its day, but in an Irish-Catholic enclave it probably edged up to second or third. How else explain the fact that of the 21 girls in my grade school class, seven were named some form of Katherine or Kathleen? 

So, I have a ho-hum first name, but at least it wasn't a weird old Catholic saint name that sounds like a disease, such as Namadia (widow and nun), or has a wacky qualifier, like Isadora the Simple.

So, good luck to little Nori. I'm sure she will have many more K-word obstacles to overcome in her life than the somewhat silly name she's been saddled with.

Cinema Inferno

The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Alice in Wonderland (Disney not Depp).  In glorious color. It was awesome. I don't remember much about it, but my mother took me and, I think, my aunt, downtown to see it. I'm sure there was no buttered popcorn or Junior Mints in the experience because first, I would have been wearing a clean, starched, and ironed dress, and second, we lived in No-Candyland, except for the occasional Hershey bar my father would sneak in and split among us. No matter. What I didn't know about, I didn't miss. What I did know was that walking into that dark theater and seeing giant cartoons in front of me was pure magic. An American Cinema Paradiso.

Flash forward to 2013.  A new cinema has opened not far from my home.  I wish I could say that I am excited that the musty old multiplex has been renovated and that I look forward to visiting. But I can't. I fear this cranky old crone-nut is not  Showcase Superlux material. The cinema is part of the swanky new "lifestyle complex," The Street At Chestnut Hill, and, apart from my general lack of interest in lifestyle complexes, there is a reason I won't be experiencing the Superlux Experience any time soon.

Not that Superlux has absolutely zero appeal. Even if management can't guarantee that every flick features Superlux Story, Acting, or Direction, I might have been persuaded by the Superlux Seats which recline and have footrests,the Superlux Technology with state of the art bells and whistles, the Superlux Carpeting with no gum stuck to it, and the Superlux Restrooms which must boast red carpet amenities and nary a wad of sodden toilet paper to sully their Superlux Floors.

But the Superlux Experience has one big Superlux Feature that turns it into Cinema Inferno.

It's not  the admission price tag which tops out at a hellish $28, although I do admit to a bit of sticker shock since the last movie I went to cost $7.50.  And, no that wasn't in the year ought-five, it was last Friday evening.  

It's not even the circles-of-hell tiered system of admissions--Lux Lite (a mere $20) and Superlux--with their different levels of cushiness and service, like a plane. (There doesn't appear to be a Geezer Discount, which in and of itself isn't the deal breaker.)

No, It's the diabolical Superlux Food and Beverage Service. Yes, service.  Superluxians can order food and drink right without getting off their Superlux Tushes--and it will be delivered to them by black-clad waitrons at any time. Yes, any time, including during the movie.

Won't that be exciting? Watching all those servers stumbling around with trays full of $9 Margaritas and micro-brews, instead of watching the screen?  Smelling the delightful aromas of appetizers ($8-16) wafting through the auditorium? Hot dog! Every film will be "Smell-o-Vision." (If you want a chuckle, click the link to find out how that technology worked out.)  Will they suspend service at crucial moments? Or will you listen to the big reveal or the deathbed confession over the sound of  "Which one of you ordered the Thai rolls?" I have been both audience and performer in smallish theaters, and I can assure you that someone chowing down a Carnivore's Delight pizza or digging into a mound of malodorous take-out is quite the, um, Experience.  And it ain't Superlux.  Not to mention the to-ing and fro-ing which I would find mighty distracting.

If you create an atmosphere of a cocktail lounge happy hour, no matter how upmarket, how do you think the patrons will behave? Like people who are there to be absorbed in the movie? Or people who are out to par-tay? Will there be Superlux Cones of Silence to drop around them? Or do the waitrons double as bouncers?

I understand the commercial impulse behind all this. There is nothing wrong with wanting people to leave their comfy caves and spend money in your entertainment establishment.  I hope people have a rip-roaring good time and that they feel their triple-digit evening at the movies is worth it. I hope that no one has a plate of pulled pork dropped onto a silk blouse or wind up with a lapful of brewski. I hope that "Sh-h-h" doesn't escalate to "Shut the %@#* up!"

But I won't be there to find out. I recently figured out how to operate the remote controls for the superlux technology that has stood idle here in Trousertown for many a year,  I am more than happy to lounge around the den where the only Smell-O-Vision is the scent of pine trees and the ocean. Where I can loll shoeless, clutching my beverage of choice. Where I can unapologetically binge-watch "Game of Thrones" and "Breaking Bad" and "Duck Dynasty." Best of all? No Cones of Silence will ever be required.

Oh, No! FOMO!

The only thing I miss about my twenties is my hair.  I had a stress-inducing job as a middle-school teacher, a job for which I had training but for which I was completely unsuited.  I had 175 pounds of ugly fat and a beard in the form of a stress-inducing and unsuitable husband. (To be fair, there was stress, if not blubber and a beard, on both sides.) But my hair was long and shiny, unravaged by dye jobs and age, and I could cut the split ends myself for free.

So, no--coiffure aside--I don't long to be twenty again, especially when I read about the poor millennials and how they suffer from plagues that were unimaginable in my day, plagues like FOMO.

Glued to their devices, they are unable to maintain eye contact with the world, or enjoy much of what little fun they can afford, because of "Fear of Missing Out." Like the inhabitants of the Second Circle of the Inferno (that would be Dante's Inferno, not Dan Brown's), they cannot settle on anything, and are blown hither and thither by the winds of social media. 

William Blake's version makes it
look like they're being flushed through an intestine.

What are they so afraid of missing out on? Gossip about the Kardashians? The latest episode of Game of Thrones? A drink at a bar with people who are so much more fun that the ones they are with? BIngo. Those who are dissatisfied with their lives for larger reasons (student loans, dead-end jobs, living in their parents' basements) are afraid of missing out on social opportunities, and, phone in hand, they are powerless to stop scrolling and trolling, even though it may make them feel worse.

Talk about life skills that have gone the way of white gloves and wide-legged suits. Does it never occur to these poor little things that if they paid more attention to who they were with and what was really going on they could turn off the phone?  They could decide for themselves, with their own psyches, without, gasp, the services of an app, who was boring, who was interesting, who was worth spending time with. 

Wowie Zowie!  In the olden days, we had to figure it out and deal with it on our own. Since we didn't have to actually see or hear our not-so-faraway friends and acquaintances getting shit-faced without us, or twistin' the night away, or generally jackassing around, we were free to imagine that they were moping around the hacienda or stuck with Aunt Prissy at the family BBQ. Even on those occasions when we had to suck it up, and try to be cordial to those around us, even if every cell in our bodies was screaming "listen:  there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go", we didn't have to feel bad about it because we couldn't check out that universe on Facebook, twitter, Instagram or whatever;  we could let it go and worry about it later, or more probably, not at all.

The beauty of Geezerland is that I can selectively live in the future, or the past.  Not only do I have no Fear Of Missing Out, I actually experience LOMO, or Love of Missing Out. I quite enjoy the empty mailbox, the quiet phone, the white spaces on the calendar. Best of all, there's no app needed. No app. Just nap. 

"The Devil Made Me Do It,"

quipped Pope Francis after laying hands on a man in a wheelchair on Sunday in what some Vatican sources in an attempt to downplay the event are terming an unintentional exorcism, but which actual exorcists are claiming as a full-fledged casting out of devils.

"I could see Satan inside that young man, sticking his tongue out at me, and rolling his eyes, and wiggling his horns, so what else could I do against such evil?  I had to slap him upside the head," said Francis. "It felt good."

The young man/spawn of Satan reportedly heaved several times and collapsed.  The Vatican denies that this was a flashback, or post-traumatic panic attack, triggered by the sight of a man in a cassock approaching him with outstretched hands and then laying those hands upon him.

Satan watchers are thrilled that the new Pope has such excellent anti-satanic skills, and are hoping he can bring them to bear on such devilish tricks as global warming, hurricanes, tornadoes and the continued popularity of reality TV, especially Dancing with the Stars. Satan worshippers are, however, keeping a wary eye on Francis, whose activities they view as a threat to their religious practices.

The Vatican Office of Liturgy has announced that, in honor of Pope Francis, congregations may, if they choose, replace  reciting The Lord's Prayer with singing The Witch Doctor.

Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang

Walla walla, bing bang

The Man On The Galloping Horse

No, not the Lone Ranger, but the galloping ghost of housework.

I was trained in housework by my mother who ran a pretty tight Germanic ship dirt-wise in spite of the size and rowdiness of our family. No floor considered clean unless it was scrubbed on hands and knees.  No toilet spared the disinfecting bleach rinse. Dusting to include the part of the side table that was under the doily. Clean towels every day, and I assure you our house was no luxury hotel. Achtung, Baby!

Do I follow in her footsteps, mop in hand, scrub brush at the ready? No, I do not. I follow in the footsteps of my paternal grandmother, Nanny, an altogether more lackadaisical housekeeper.  Her standard was that if something (dirt, scum, crack in the plaster, baked-on grease, dust bunny) was "not so's a man on a galloping horse would notice," that meant it was clean enough for anyone, or at least anyone as Irish as we were.  

I am a lucky woman.  I have the good-enough cleaning service every other week, and while they are not up to my mother's standard, they are not of the galloping horse variety either. 

But even a tidy, relatively clean house inhabited by two adults can harbor things that will knock the Man right off his Galloping Horse.

A couple of weeks ago we returned home after a few days away to be met by the dreaded mold smell. The dehumidifier was turned on immediately even if it was 40 degrees outside.  But the mold smell lingered. It took me a few days (told you I took after Nanny) but eventually I realized that the dehumidifier didn't do a darned thing for the source of the stench:  the garbage disposal.

Being the lazy-ass sloven that I am, I tossed a used-up lemon in it and called it a day.  For the next few days I focused on the lemony aroma instead of the lingering moldiness.

It was only when something (turned out to be date pits) was rattling around in the disposal and I had to stick my hand in it to pull it out (yeah, yeah, I know that is worse than running with scissors) and I inadvertently yanked the rubber gasket out that I saw it:  the layer of sludge all over it, and, as it turned out, all over the other non-removable gasket, including the invisible, but reachable, underside.

Okay, it wasn't this bad.
I didn't have to put on a bunny suit to clean it.

Skeeve! Gag! Retch! I almost grabbed for the bleach, but then I thought that it would probably do something dire to the plastic gasket, and then I'd be off to the races trying to track down a replacement which would cost $7.13 plus $6.00 postage.

Turns out that white vinegar works.  Makes your house smell like a pickle factory, but it works. Eventually. After a lot of scrubbing.  A lot of soaking. A lot of scraping with a toothpick. A lot of sticking your hand into the garbage disposal with a vinegar soaked paper towel wrapped around your fingers. 

Later I found this charming article from Fluff-Po that recommends using vinegar ice cubes. Tempting, but after once hearing a story about how my husband's grandmother ate a tub of sherbet that turned out to be brine shrimp fish food I have never liked to put oddments like vinegar ice cubes in my freezer.

I know that I told you the other day that my mantra was Honey Badger Don't Care, but I'm here to tell you that if Mold can knock the Man off the Horse, it can kick Mantra's wimpy butt any day.

My Girl Pearl

I'd just returned from my annual doctor's visit with new resolve to eat more salad and less candy for a few weeks to drop the winter flab-ola. Seemed a small price to pay for postponing if not avoiding my cardiac destiny.

I thought I had come to terms with the luck of my genetic draw.  If I can't eat unlimited Cheetohs and Ring-Dings, I won't cry. But then I read about Pearl Catrell.  Boo-hoo! Hand me my hankie!

Pearl just celebrated her 105th birthday with a ride in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.  Why did this lovely lady get such a treat?  Because she attributes her longevity to her daily consumption of bacon--crispy bacon--two slices for breakfast and maybe another couple of slices for lunch. Bacon! Demon bacon! Who knew?

Truthfully, I suspect Pearl's longevity comes from her ancestors who appear to be a lot of hard-working Texas farmers who actually worked on the land instead of collecting enormous subsidies from the pork barrel. For Pearl, the bacon is the gravy, the ice cream, the hot fudge sauce on top of that pile of lucky genes. 

But, what if?  If only she were right.  If only eating a couple of strips of salty, fatty, nitrate-laden char was the real fountain of youth.  





Nutrition information comes and goes in a Seussian whirl of no-fat, low-fat, good-fat, bad-fat. 

Worry floats from additive to additive. Remember the cyclamates that gave Tab it's polarizing taste:  can't live without it/wouldn't drink it if I were in the middle of the Mojave dying? 

Now we are told to worry/not worry about high-fructose corn syrup, to worry/not worry about about GMO's, to worry/not worry about aspartame.  (All I can say is, at least I don't live in China where I might have to worry about rat meat sold as lamb.)

I'd like to believe that Pearl is right, but the nasty voice of reason whispers, "Dream on."  So, I'll dream. But, if movies are our dreams, then I'll take comfort in this scene from Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973), in which, according to the IMDb, "A nerdish store owner is revived out of cryostasis into a future world to fight an oppressive government." Not nutritionally oppressive, though.

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."

Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.

Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?

Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

Dr. Melik: Incredible.

Trouserville: We should all live so long!


Fun (?) Fact from the Trouserville Memory Bank:  While Tiger's Milk is now a brand of nutrition bar, it was a canister of dried up nutrition popular in the 1970's. Don't ask me how I know that it tasted like garbage.

Trouserville Thank You to my sister Trish for letting me know about Pearl.

Gadget Goo Goo, Gadget Ga Ga

Swell.  Just what I need.  Another hazard to sidewalk navigation.  

Bad enough to be a hale and hearty senior citizen striding down the pavement, intent on getting there, when I can remember where "there" is, and to be obstructed by some young whippersnapper suffering from the cell-phone stagger or the twitter totter, lurching from side to side, oblivious to just how much real estate they are hogging.  I'm thinking of buying a cane to carry with me. Much more refined than a cattle prod, don't you think?

But soon I'll have something else to contend with when the pant-pant, drool-drool, most awaited, super coolest, most niftiest gadget of all time ever hits the street: Google Glasses.  Right now it's limited to a handful of uber-geeks, but should be inflicted upon the general public in the fall.

Imagine the traffic jams.  How do I get by someone wearing specs that allow an unprecedented level of peripatetic multi-tasking? A polite a-hem, excuse me, won't get the attention of someone who's strolling along taking photos, texting by mouth, ordering pizza by blinking, while at the same time monitoring the behavior of the bitcoin market, cruising re-runs of Baywatch, programming advanced avionic systems, and plotting the demise of whatever evil overlords dominate in their MMORPG universe. Someone who will, at least in the beginning, cause complete gridlock as the curious and envious gather in his or her wake.

I do see that eventually all this may work to my advantage, even if I don't adopt the technology. When I am old enough to be walking down the street babbling to myself and swaying to music that only I can hear, everyone will be wearing googly eyes, and I won't look deranged, I'll look stylish. If they combine it with a self-driving Segway I won't even need that cane.

I only hope there will be someone as fabulous as Freddie to compose an anthem to the poor old smartphone (or insert name of your favorite outmoded tech toy).  Radio  Ga Ga, Radio Goo Goo, indeed.

Early Bird Special

Every time I see the sign "early bird special," it conjures up a picture of doddering oldsters gumming their comfort food dinners while it is still light out. Very funny, until it came to this: a dinner so early-birdy that it was really lunch.

Real retro lunch, too. None of your hipster-retro grilled pork belly or caramelized bacon.  Nyuh-uh. This was the real deal. And it was delicious.

FIsh cake, baked beans, cole slaw, corn bread.

When I was a kid, my family almost never went to restaurants.  Once a summer we went to the Fox Lounge for the open face steak sandwich.  A huge grilled strip steak lolling atop two thin slices of toast which pretty much dissolved in the meat juice, that sandwich was as far from our usual sandwich fare of baloney on white bread as it could be. The platter was completed with an avalanche of french fries, cooked in beef fat, of course, because this was in the days before the cholesterol police took the fun out of fries.

I'm sure that once the early bird families who came only to chow down on steaks packed it in for the night, hauling greasy kids and doggie bags full of meat, the Fox Lounge showed it's true neon-beer-sign colors and became a  rowdy road house with drinkin', dancin', and carryin' on aplenty.

The place I had lunch today, The Sagamore Inn in Sandwich, Massachusetts reminds me of the old Fox Lounge, only much, much cleaner. It's a wonderful family run restaurant serving seafood, Italian food, and Shirley's Famous Pot Roast. The most modern thing on the menu is a Classic Caesar Salad. In the summer you can get breakfast, too.

What really brings the Fox Lounge to mind is the old sign just outside the bar area:

I'm surprised it doesn't read "NO DANCING per order of the Sandwich Police Dept." I'm sure it had something to do with licensing or blue laws, but can't you just see a hussy in a polka dot dress being asked to leave the premises on account of a little butt-shimmying? Or a wise guy in a zoot suit being shown the door for toe-tapping? 

You know why I like that sign so much, and the wood paneled walls and booths, and the painted tin ceiling?  They date from the time when my parents were young. It's as though my own memory has extended back before I was born, and that doesn't make me feel old at all.  It makes me feel young. 

But not so young that I would even think about violating the atmosphere by DANCING. 

Excuse me, but I think there's a doggie bag calling my name.

Not So Merry Mouseketeers

Wipe that goofy grin off your face, Mickey.  Everyone's very favorite Mousketeer died today. Sob! Annette Funicello has gone to the Clubhouse in the Sky.

The talent given to you and me
we must develop faithfully
so we can be good Mouseketeers.

The boys all wanted to "date" her, and we girls wanted to hate her, but we couldn't because she was so damned nice, and, really, in our hearts, we wanted to be her.  I had brown hair, so why didn't I look like Annette? Well, that would be genetic; once and "een" always an "een" so the best I could hope for was Doreen who looked like she came out of the same boiled-potato-face gene pool that I did.  


When she graduated to the beach blanket, I still wanted to be her.  Q: Why couldn't I have fun like Annette?  A: Because my mother was mean, and back in the 1960's good Catholic girls didn't wear two-piece bathing suits or show cleavage.



By the time Annette got around to shilling for Skippy peanut butter, I had long stopped worrying about being Annette.  For one thing, ours was a Peter Pan family, so I wasn't impressed with her taste.  For another, she and Frankie and the gang were way over on the other side of the Great Cultural Divide of 1967. Summer of Love didn't include any beach blanket bingo as far as I could tell. 

But she'll always live in my heart as my first style icon.  And while four years older seemed an awful lot back them, it's not a lot now, and I think "So young to go."  Maggie Thatcher also died today, but she was 87, and I certainly never thought of her as an icon of anything beyond annoying politics, although, come to think of it,  her helmet head hairdo did resemble Annette's.

So, on this sad day in Trouserville, let's raise a glass of milk and chow down on a peanut butter sandwich in honor of Annette Funicello, always and forever a good, good, good Mousketeer.
  

Truckin' With the Doo-Dah Man

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.