My Little Stasi

There's an app for that.

For years I have bitched and moaned about my prosperous but non-civic-minded neighbors who will have their driveways plowed and leave their sidewalks unshoveled, a direct and selfish affront to those increasingly few of us who actually walk to the bank, the post office, the library, the liquor store.

The public scold within was furious, but thwarted.  By the time I slip-slided my way to wherever I was going, the desire to rat them out had burnt itself out. Until the next time.

But the app-gods have listened and my town has introduced an app for snitching on the neighbors: B(for Brookline)ONLINE, available for both iOS and Android. The graphics look like they were designed by a second grader with a color crayon, but it functions like a proper little spy, um citizen reporting, device.

The scold in me is thrilled.  There's a handy-dandy checklist that includes unshoveled sidewalks, potholes,  and sidewalk obstructions.  The only thing that isn't on the list is rogue wild turkeys which we have aplenty, but which apparently aren't the responsibility of the Department of Public Works.  You can include a photo in your report, a report which can be anonymous.

The paranoid in me is less ecstatic.  There is something very unsettling about a cheerful, easy-to-use reporting system that allows anonymity.  What makes it more unsettling is that this is one of the most politically liberal towns in the United States.  I'll spare you the rant, but think what the Stasi could have done with an app like this one.

Become a Citizen Reporter! Be the eyes and ears of the town online or on your mobile phone. This feature allows citizens to submit requests, report issues (potholes, graffiti, broken street-lights, etc), check for other requests, and get a timely response from the town. Report online or download the smartphone app via the iTunes store or the Android Marketplace.

Je suis fatiguée

I'm not Charlie.  I didn't subscribe to Boston Strong either. I am tired, though, and what I am is tired of is the sloganization of world events.

Yes, it is terrible that three terrorists took out twelve journalists in Paris.  But an illuminated Arc de Triomphe declaring "Paris est Charlie" just seems beside the point.  And though the French have always prided themselves on logic, no live person or (entire city) is a mortally wounded magazine.

Meanwhile, over in Africa, Amnesty International reports that Boko Haram massacred as many as 2,000 at one crack.  I dare the sloganeers to take on that one.  They won't.  The snappy catch phrases belong to the first worlders who get bent out of shape when the terror toads have the audacity to commit crimes on their Euro-turf or mess up their civic events.  Crimes that in the larger scheme of bad news seem about as serious as farting in elevators.

The world is a stinkin' place, full of stinkin' creatures that just can't stand anyone who isn't just as mired in the year 900 as they are. And it's particularly stinkin' because there is no solution. Just more slogans, more candlelight vigils, more sad illusions that all that mourning makes one bit of difference.

Happy Whatever

Happy Holiday of your choice.  My family celebrates Christmas in a not very pious, oh, make that downright raucous, manner with eats, drinks, loud renditions of Christmas in Killarney and Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer, and a stellar Yankee Swap. 

The older I get, though, the more my holiday spirit dwindles.  I stuffed a few greens in a pitcher, draped some LED lights on the mantel, and put a wreath on the door, but the whole thing makes me feel more jaded than jolly.  The rainy, gray weather isn't exactly festive, and I live in a multi-culti neighborhood where not too many people celebrate the winter holidays.  There are some new folks who did install a vintage light-up Santa and a couple of inflatables in the front yard which is a nice change from terminally tasteful white lights in every window. They aren't worried about their electric bill, I guess, and thankfully they keep the inflatables pumped up during the day which spares the neighbors the sight of snowmen and penguins lying face down on the lawn like deflated drunks.

Myself, I observe the Solstice.  Notice I didn't say celebrate, because there is nothing to celebrate about the darkest days of the year except that they are quickly over and it will only be a couple of months until it is noticeably lighter at 4:30 in the afternoon.

That Solstice observance is a generally downbeat look at the year that is ending, with a firm heave-ho to things that have taken up residence in my psyche and to which I no longer wish to grant roosting room.  This year that list includes thinking about Dick Cheney. Sayonara, sucker, and go back into your hole or your vampire coffin or wherever it is you hang out when not fulminating about spy-world and let us think about something more pleasant.  Good-bye to thoughts about celebrities and the First World Plus problems such as being trash-talked behind their backs by other celebrities and having the trash spread about by the minions of the World's Twerpiest Dictator, Ever.  Good-bye to the twirling beach ball of death that has taken up residence in my antiquated lap-top. Good-bye to all the annoying things I can't remember right now because I did such a good job of removing them from my consciousness.

I'll spend the week between Christmas and New Year's ignoring the ubiquitous best of the year lists and packing up my kitchen in preparation for a renovation that will render it unusable for four months. Now that's something to look forward to, even though I know it will provide many an item for next year's top ten annoying moments list.

Ear Worms Are Eating My Sanity

And this week the ear worms are wearing Santa hats.

I do a lot of walking. I enjoy the fresh air.  I enjoy the exercise. I enjoy not having to worry about finding a parking space.

What I don't enjoy is the sound track in my head, radio station WTFD (Why The F#$@ Did-I-Remember-That), playing non-stop drivel in the form of pop, rock, and folk.  Since that is about the only music I have ever listened to, I can't really expect to hear arias, classic jazz or Handel's Messiah, now can I?

Last week's ear worm (All About That Bass) has been supplanted for the holidays not by Good King Wenceslas or even Weird Al's Christmas At Ground Zero, but by the Whiting's Egg Nog jingle, straight from the Vault of Really Old Crap from the 1950's embedded in my psyche.

When I listened to it on You Tube I was quite pleased to discover that in spite of it's age and mine, I had remembered the lyrics. 

Cheer, cheer, cheer!

The holidays are here!

It's egg nog time!

Whitings' Egg Nog time!

The reason I remember must be that I heard it year after year after year.  Seems quaint now, but companies used to repeat the same Xmas ads year after year after year.  Even more quaint, the Xmas hoopla didn't start until the day after Thanksgiving.

But the egg nog jingle really seems a bit much.  I don't have any fond memories of sitting around the family punch bowl, and I really hate egg nog, which has always seemed like a drink for people who want to hide their alcohol consumption in a cup of opaque glop.  I guess the modern equivalent would be pouring a slug of vodka into the green sludge of a kale smoothie. 

Every ear worm runs its course, even if it may recur, and I'm sure the egg nog will pass in time for New Year's, if not before, when it will probably morph into Blue Christmas or I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.  I'd like to put in a request for something with a better beat.  In that case I'll be the old lady shimmy-shimmy-coco-bopping down to the Post Office, in sync with the music in my head.  

Shameless Publicity Hound of the Year Award?

And the winner is . . . .

Ben Edelman, Harvard Business School professor and bush-league pundit in the hotsy-totsy consulting field of on-line fraud prevention and detection.

His consulting biz must be a bit on the lean side, though, else why would he engage in an on-line vendor war with a local Chinese restaurant over the discrepancy between the prices on an outmoded webpage versus the prices he was charged for  his stir-fried supper?

After the recent Grubergate debacle, I'd think that even a blowhard lawyer/economist would think twice before committing himself to the passive-aggressive warfare of snotty emails and complaints to the  Massachusetts Consumer Protection authorities described in today's boston.com article which reprints the correspondence between Edelman and Ran Duan of Sichuan Garden.

It has to be for the publicity, and he has succeeded quite well engendering such dreamy headlines as:

Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food

I'm sure his clients will be really impressed by his acumen and tenacity.   He also garnered a shout out from the GS Eleveator Gossip Twitter feed (@GSElevator):

Harvard’s Ben Edelman is a scumbag piece of shit…

(Actually, it is hard to imagine overhearing that comment in the GS elevator without the qualifier:  and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.)

Maybe Ben-Boy is simply jealous of Ran Duan, who is himself no slouch in the publicity department, having been featured in a Boston Magazine article earlier this year and been recently named "America's Most Imaginative Bartender" by GQ.  Is the whole thing just part of an esoteric pissing contest that hasn't been uncovered? Is Prawn-gate just the beginning of National Enquirer-worthy revelations?

There's no mention of what fortune Edelman received in his complimentary cookie, but it probably didn't say: You don't hunt mosquitoes with an elephant gun, unless you are a Harvard B School professor in which case you are exempt from the rules of common sense, not to mention common courtesy.

Here's Looking at You, Netflix!

Long ago, long before there was an internet, and faced with the dismal prospect of choosing between watching  It's A Wonderful Life or Candlepins for Cash, I moaned that, in spite of owning a state-of-the-art Sony Betamax VCR I just wasn't able to watch what I wanted to watch when I wanted to watch it.  Avoiding the stale leftovers of broadcast TV meant going out into the real world and driving to a video store where, one could only hope, they would have a comedy that didn't revolve around bodily functions or a classic drama that I hadn't already seen.

I will know that I  am living in the future, I proclaimed, when I can point the remote at the tube and choose from a menu of just about anything ever made.  Well, Prais the Great God Mammon, the future is here, more or less, and I am happy, more or less. Binge watching has never been easier, and although not everything-everything is available always-always, I can still manage to spend my allotted viewing time scrolling through the offerings, enjoying the plenty even if I can't come to a decision.

There are a few shows I make a point of keeping up on, though, and one that made the cut was Longmire.  I love this show.  Walt Longmire is The Law, sometimes aided by his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, barkeep and tracker, and his deputy Victoria Moretti, a transplant from Philly. There are no city streets.  No hipster irony. No terrorism plots.  No bureaucracy.  No scenes in abandoned warehouses. Just a smoke-free, yet complicated,  Marlboro Man versus the equally complicated bad guys. Sometimes the chase scenes are on horseback, or feature a waist-deep slog through snowdrifts, and above it all, The Big Sky.  It's an updated version of the TV Westerns that dominated the networks back when I wasn't old enough to stay up to watch them.

A & E produced three seasons of Longmire, and then pulled the plug, in spite of the fact that it had a more than respectable audience size.  Why give it the chop?  The audience was comprised mainly of those worthless undesirables: people like me who had aged out of the advertisers' pet demographic of 18-49.  I guess that's what happens when you put on a show that is realistic, but not "reality," or  is a bit more complex than Duck Dynasty.  And, of course, everyone knows that once you are over 49 it is a quick slide into housebound dementia on a budget that can't stretch to more than cartons of Depends and cases of Ensure.

But there will be a fourth season, thanks to Netflix, which has a business model that doesn't rely entirely on the "key demo," and I'll bet there are a few oldsters who will sign on to Netflix because of Longmire, and stick around for the other offerings.  Housebound dementos are a good market for Netflix, after all, since we need all the  entertainment we can get to while away the weary hours until oblivion, and we don't wish to be cajoled into buying more stuff that won't fit into those closets full of canned cat food, video tapes, and photo albums.

Join me as I raise a can of nutrition beverage and make a toast to my favorite time waster:  Here's looking at you, Netflix!

As for you, A&E, just go fight your Storage Wars and leave us old folk alone.

Yoo-hoo, Cohasset, it's 2014

not 1914.

I used to live in the next town over from Cohasset, Massachusetts.  Cohasset was much ritzier than my little town, which wasn't ritzy at all. I drove through Cohasset on the way to a memorial service a couple of weeks ago, and it is still ritzy, in that rock-bound coast, black shutters on white clapboard way of many New England seaside towns.

It's citizens are moneyed, but not, apparently, very street-smart.  A rash of car burglaries, right outside of (gasp!) their very houses occurred over the weekend, netting the miscreants sacks of goodies including cash, phones, and electronics.  Most, if not all, of the swag taken from unlocked cars.

Cohasset Burglar Doing The Happy Dance

Duh, double-duh, huh-whuh!?! In the article I read in the Boston Globe, a shocked Cohasseter  claims "never to have heard of such a thing." Talk about a sheltered life.

No, I'm not blaming the victims, but come on, folks,  take a little responsibility.  First, your cars are sitting outside, not in your three-car garages.  Second, they are unlocked. Third, you leave your valuables in them.  Fourth, your town has little or nothing for kids to do of an evening.  What do you think might happen?

In the olden days, in my not very ritzy town, kids used to smash windows in cars and pry out the stereos which they peddled to each other, or took down to the Gut and tossed into the water for fun.   Back then, it might have made a bit of sense to leave the car unlocked, so as to avoid the smashed window, but mostly the larcenous little darlings didn't bother to check.

No one has bothered to steal a car stereo for years.  Thievery is a whole lot easier now, with all that free-floating paraphernalia most people seem to haul around, (the stuff you can easily gather up and take with you when you leave your car unlocked)  especially if your targets don't have the sense to realize that even in a cushy enclave, there may be somebody who wants their stuff.

Bah, Humbug!

Nothing makes me more truly, deeply depressed than wheeling a grocery cart past a display of cellophane wrapped fruit baskets to the accompaniment of Jingle Bells, arranged, it seems, to sound as much as possible like the Dead March from Saul.  It happened to me this very morning.  My eyes started to tear up and I had to use every bit of my elderly will power to keep pushing the cart along. I wanted to run for the nearest exit and stagger outside to think about something more cheerful,  like the amount of arsenic there is in rice.

This is how happy Christmas music makes me.

There is nothing worse than down-tempo Jingle Bells. Except maybe the Kenny G version of Oh, Holy Night in a coffee shop.  Or  Burl Ives singing Holly Jolly Christmas from the speakers installed on the outside of the shopping mall.  Or The Chipmunks singing anything.

It's all pretty grim.  While I love sitting around on Christmas Eve singing our adults-only version of Christmas in Killarney, I find public Christmas music to be the very worst part of the very worst time of the year. The whole ho-ho-ho of it makes me feel about a thousand years old, reminding me that not only don't I believe in Santa Claus, but that I don't believe in much of anything.  Except for the laws of gravity and the stupidity of our elected officials and their minions.

Until now, the only recourse was to stay home and shop online. But because we are now living in the future,  even that may soon be impossible.  When I signed on to Amazon this morning up popped an invitation to "Listen free while you shop." As of today, it's voluntary, but I foresee a time when it will be one more non-optional media horror show, like TV screens in airports, and elevator music.

I couldn't bring myself to click through to "An Amazon Exclusive Playlist to get you in the holiday spirit," so I have no idea what the musical selections include. You'll have to find out for yourself, if you dare.

And if you think I was kidding about the Jingle Bells, it really was playing at the same tempo as the Dead March, and, frankly, the Dead March is more cheerful.

Keep Away

No, not Keep Away the game we played in the street with a gang of kids and a beat up rubber ball, which you may know as Monkey in the Middle.

Rather, it's Keep Away as in "Get it out of here." The Keep in question is Keep.com, self-described (and the punctuation is all theirs) as:

                      Shopping made simple. Oh and beautiful, too.
                      Keep is your new shopping obsession. Join for free.

I would describe it as Pinterest with price tags, a socially networked time-suck with instant buying opportunities, devoted to insecurity and the impulse purchase.  I mean, would you be caught dead buying boots that didn't have more than single-digit likes? Didn't think so.

So far, the website looks like it is the shopping ground of very young women who all have the same taste in short skirts, tiny jewelry, high-heeled boots, and items imprinted with silly sayings about sex.  Not judging.  If it were populated by my demographic it would be filled with elastic-waist black trousers, I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up medallions, bunion-friendly ground grippers, and items with silly sayings about senility.  (And who says that we oldsters don't know how to spend money?)

For each item you can hit Like, Keep or Share.  If you click through on an item, you can Like, Keep, or Buy.  Alas, Keep.com is a shopper's happy place and there is no Trash option. You can also follow the person who "discovered" the item, in case you actually have to work for a living and don't have all day and night to pursue discoveries on your own. Oh, wait a minute, those intrepid discoverers are "tastemakers," and when they aren't curating, they are beautifully presenting.

Keep: Curated by tastemakers. Beautifully presented. Immediately shoppable. Totally addictive.

It's probably harmless enough, unless you have a limited budget and are prone to addiction, and I'm sure those who enjoy advertisements divorced from all that pesky content will find it worthwhile.  But it's just one more website with app that is doubtless employing dozens of bright young things in building yet more handbaskets for the Hell Express.

Like? Keep? Share? Next Stop Hell.

So join for free. Credit card melt down made simple. Oh and beautiful, too.

HOLY-WEEN? Holy Cow!

Hand me the black jellybeans and hold the holy water.

Just in time for Halloween, the Vatican has hosted a conference of exorcists.  What's on the program? How to vomit-proof your exorcist suit? I don't even want to think about a trade-show type marketplace.

In addition, the spoilsports of the Vatican have sent out the word that, come the 31st, good Catholic kids should dress up like saints, because it is Holy-ween.  (Actually, dudes, hallow does mean holy.)

This is old hat to me and my sister who were raised in the good old days of the Catholic School Hegemony that was 1950's Urban America, Worcester (Mass.)  Division. We had Halloween parties at school, but they were All Hallow's Eve parties because the next day was All Saint's Day, a Holy Day of Obligation (No school. Yay! Had to get up early anyway to go to Mass! Boo!).  We had to dress up like saints. This is what we refer to as "compulsory fun."

I won't go into the details--this was back in the day when costumes were home-made, with perhaps a purchased mask--but one year I dressed as my patron saint, Saint Catherine of Alexandria who was tortured to death on a wheel.  The only wheel I could find was from an old baby buggy, but needs must;  there was no way an actual torture wheel was in the budget and my father was no handyman.

My costume had a much higher neckline.

Actually, as a patron saint, I preferred the more intellectual Saint Catherine of Siena, but she didn't meet such a colorful end.  She only ate Communion wafers for years so she, duh, starved to death.  Not much of a nutritional role model, but she was otherwise a smart cookie and a few years ago I got to visit her mummified head in Siena.

Do you sense a theme here? The lives of the saints usually ended in some sort of torture, and we were spared no details. Machines of individual destruction included wheels (St. C of A), racks, crucifixes both right side up and upside down, griddles (St. Lawrence, whose reported last words were "Turn me over, I'm done on this side), and arrows (St. Sebastian, the painter's favorite pincushion.)  Methods of dispatch included burning at the stake, dismemberment, drawing and quartering,  severing of breasts, gouging out of eyeballs and tongues.  And, we were told, this sort of thing was going on right now in other parts of the world,  and if Sister Says It You'd Better Believe It.

That this pornography of pain was considered suitable fare for elementary school children makes me shriek. And if you think pornography is too strong a word, go google "St. Sebastian images." No wonder I was a nervous wreck, worried as I was about whether I would renounce my faith (direct path to Hell)  or submit to disemboweling by a Communist (immediate stairway to Heaven). Things got much easier when I realized I had no faith to renounce.  It's possible I believed in Santa Claus longer than I believed in Baby Jesus.

St. Sebastian, mild version, only two arrows and no gushing blood.

Note to the boys in the black cassocks (which make nifty witch costumes, by the by):  Focusing on the sad, demented, tortured, and gruesome lives of the saints isn't such smart marketing.  Not many kiddos want to grow up to suck on lepers' sores, like St. Damien.  Then again, maybe that's the type of sheep you are trying to attract to the flock.

This year, as most years, we'll be joining family in Salem, Mass. for the Halloween festivities.  The closest to a saints'  costume we'll see will likely be on a grown man dressed as a priest accompanied by a naughty nurse or a pirate wench.  We'll sit on the stoop and watch the traditional parade of goblins, ghosts, princesses, witches and superheros. The only vigil we'll be keeping will be over the candy bowl, because at my sister's house, located in the heart of Witch City, and visited by hundreds of sugar hounds, it's one candy bar to a customer.

Oh, My Exploding Head!

A sure sign of aging:  the increasing frequency with which my head threatens to explode when I read the news.  (Another sign that I am really old is that I still read the news, sometimes in an actual paper printed on crinkly actual newsprint with smudgy actual ink.)

This morning the bearded ghost of Allen Ginsberg * stands on the breakfast table and HOWLS:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

     starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking 

     for an angry fix,

But that last bit sounded more like:

Uber-ing themselves through the Wi-Fi 

streets at dawn looking 

   for an awesome app

I was reading about a company which has 30 employees in 4 cities and what they do is provide app-based reservation services for a whopping 90 restaurants so far.  Who pays for the reservation?  Why, you do.  $5 bucks a pop.  You might even be able to make a reservation for a special meal only available to the cool kids who make their reservations through the app.  Sucker burgers with sap sauce?

You can include a picture in your in-app profile and the restaurant staff will greet you by name. Wow! Instant celebrity when the tattooed host at the Dude Food Blood and Bones Brewpub and Grill high-fives you at the entrance. That's probably worth the $5 right there.

I am sure these clever youngsters over at Reservatronics (or whatever they call themselves) have visions of buy-out sugarplums dancing in their heads as they apply their energy, technological savvy, and desire to solving the immense problem of getting a reservation in a restaurant.

I really like my red-clad pocket pal of a phone, and I probably use as many silly apps as anyone my age, (that is, someone who remembers dial-up on-line access), but it is really appalling that so many folks are spending so much energy to solve minuscule non-problems.

I guess the enormous problems are just too enormous to be solved by a nifty little app.  The hard and messy solutions are never going to be acquired for mega-bucks either. And the beat goes on.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
                                                Allen Ginsberg: Howl, Part 2

*Actually, it was my bearded husband, Rick Teller, who stood beside the breakfast table laughing his head off reciting the Ginsberg lines. Thanks for the inspiration.

Apologies To My Ancestors

Dear Folks,

We've never met, but I feel I owe you an apology.

I'm pretty sure that when you boarded the old tubs in the old countries you were hoping for a better life for you and yours,  one that didn't involve stoop labor in a mucky plot of land.  If you imagined the life that your grandchildren and great-grandchildren might one day live, it probably involved pens and paper, accounting books, and more than one pair of shoes.

I'm happy to report that my own quite privileged life has involved pens and paper, accounting books, and more shoes than anyone needs.  I hope you would be proud of me, even if the idea of the internet made your head explode.  I think you would like my house with all its indoor plumbing, central heating, and upholstered furniture, even if it isn't covered with transparent plastic dust covers at all times.

But I think you would be appalled at how I spent Saturday afternoon: on my haunches, grubbing through the dirt with my hands,  to harvest a crop of spuds.

Spuds that I had completely forgotten about. Spuds that I cultivated in the most haphazard manner imaginable.  I didn't water.  I didn't weed. I left the poor things to their own devices. And neglected though they were, they made it to the harvest, although as you can see from the photo some of them were fairly stunted.

So, my apologies, for reverting to the peasanthood you were only to happy to leave behind.  I hope your heads don't explode at my incompetence or the idea that I planted this garden for fun, not because I needed to eat.

Your humble and grateful descendant,

Kathleen

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.

The Saucy Bits

More hoo-hah every day as celebrity after celebrity, both major and minor, trashes the hackers who got into their phones, pulled out nude photos, and, gasp!, put them out on the internet.  More viral than ebola! More evil than Satan! Oh, the rhetoric!

Yes, these women have a right to feel violated.  Yes, these hackers are certainly "bad actors," which seems to be the  trendy term for miscreants, and are worthy of a bitch-slap or two.

But, here I am going to launch into full oldster crank mode:  Take all the nude photos you want, selfies or otherwise, but remember that if it's on your phone and you are famous,  it's just hacker-bait. If you're sending it along, it's hacker-bait on someone else's phone. Haven't you figured that out yet?  Even old wrinklies have heard about hackers and identity thieves, and since we were brought up in the olden days we learned the difference between public and private, a distinction that has gone the way of the daguerrotype.

Meanwhile, spare us the self-righteous anger and go back to your acting:  good, bad or otherwise.

My Last Light Bulb

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake may have seen a world in a grain of sand, but I have seen my capital M mortality in a light bulb.  

They don't make them like they used to, which is a very good thing, since the last light bulb in that fixture had separated into two parts while I wasn't looking :  metal ring wedged into the socket and glass bulb dropped to the floor and rolled under the bed.  So, off to Home Depot, where we sprang for the LED bulb.  Since the eyesight, does in fact, grow dim with age, we figured the price was right for the brighter light and for the fact that it should last longer than its predecessor.

Turns out that sucker will last longer than its purchasers.

Some are Born to sweet delight,/Some are Born to Endless Night.

But not if you install an LED light.

According to the package, at a usage of a mere three hours a day, it should last 22.2 years.

Hmm-mm--mm.  I will probably have been carted off to my semi-final (and as yet undetermined) resting place by then.

But this light fixture is in use only half the year, so that brings its life span to 44.4 years.

I will definitely have been carted off to my final resting place (an ash plot in Mount Auburn cemetery) by January 2059.

It gets more dramatic.  This light is on no more than a half an hour a day, which brings it's life span to an astonishing, and sobering, 132.2 years.

The house may not be standing by then, although it was solidly built 133 years ago and has a new roof.  Even if the house is abandoned in the great flood of the next century, the light bulb will be worth salvaging, unless the grid has collapsed and the residents of my leafy suburb have regressed to a state of feral paleolithicity.

I have just had a birthday, and as the years pile up, I have more and more thoughts about lost possibilities, last-time events, and the disposition of valuables.  But I never expected those thoughts, bitter or sweet,  to be triggered by a light bulb. 

Being a Grownup Isn't Scary. Hah!

For a moment, I was excited to see that the nearby Heartburn Pizza Cafe which had been shrouded in brown paper all summer appeared to be ready to re-open under a new name.  I had hoped for a nice little neighborhood bistro, preferably one which didn't serve kale chips and quinoa stew, but what the hell kind of tragically hip name for a restaurant is "Society of Grownups?" And who would want to eat there anyway?

Well, frowny-faces all around.  Society of Grown-Ups is not a bar and grill. It's a financial education center. It's a social network not-so-secret clubhouse. It's a place to find your "inner adult."  It's funded by local insurance company MassMutual and designed by uber-hip local firm Ideo.

Good idea, to provide financial education to recent college graduates and young adults, and probably a smart marketing initiative from a stodgy old insurance company who probably took a look at the demographic of their current clients and found they were all Trouserville cohorts, circling the drain with paid up life insurance policies grasped in their ancient claws. And who is going to start a storefront center for finding your inner geezer?  No future in that.

While the SOG website has many links to sensible financial tools and advice, the overall gestalt of the enterprise seems to be cloying cutesy-ness, which may go down well with the Instagram generation but seems downright patronizing to an old codger. A bit misleading, too, if their have your latte and drink it attitude is as pervasive as it seems to be in their tag lines and course descriptions (When Money Buys Happiness, No Cereal for Dinner, etc.).


Society of Grownups is a sort of masters program for adulthood. A place to learn how to deal with adult responsibility without losing your soul or sense of adventure along the way.

The subtext of the whole things seems to be: all those other old adults, like your parents and your teachers and the big, scary financial institutions with big, scary names, want to spoil your fun--but not us. We just want you to learn  how to spend money without giving up your daily latte, or find out what it means to cook like a grownup (hint: it probably involves kale and quinoa), or just have some fun with people just like you.  Actually, I suspect the graphics, the tone, the silliness are there to turn off potential gatecrashers of the elderly persuasion.  After all, you can't station a chipper young bouncer at the door to turn away those scary party-poopers over the age of 30.


Too bad.  I'm sure a lot of us would really love to attend their Halloween event (after all it has the old cheapsters favorite magic word in the description.)  Why, we wouldn't have to work too hard to be in costume what with all the hearing aids, walkers, moth-balled clothes and cranky faces we have at our disposal.

They haven't named the scary movie on offer but I'm betting it's a finance-themed flick.  Anyone for It's A Wonderful Life?  Or maybe the first Wall Street, because what could be scarier than Gordon Gekko's suspenders?

















Here's your invitation.  Consider yourself warned about the sugar rush.  Just don't tell them I sent you.

Being a Grownup Isn't Scary

FRIDAY, OCT 31 // 7:00 PM

Join us on Halloween for free scary movie night! Food, drinks, candy.

COME PREPARED

Wear a costume - or not! But costumes are so fun, aren't they?

TAKEAWAYS

Screams

A general feeling of terror

A sugar rush

What a Difference 50 Years Makes

Drop names, not bombs.  I'm looking at you Gi.

"Free Freedom" must make more sense in French.

"Everything looks worse in black & white..."  Or does it?

Just call me an old cranky-pants (bell-bottomed cranky-pants, of course), but the photos from the recent Chanel Spring 2015 fashion show made my head explode.  And not because of the Day-Glo colors.  I love the sassy prints and patterns, the shoes that look like you could actually walk a mile in them, and all that long straight hair.  All that effervescent estrogenic rich-grr-rr-rr-l power is kind of cute especially when you are an old, wizened crone such as myself.

But today is my birthday and I am in no mood for the commodification of protest, especially not when we are bombing them into yesterday in yet one more undeclared war.  

                                                                                                                                                                     

Here's a link to Simon & Garfunkel performing Kodachrome.  Unhappily, unfortunately.

No Rolled Trousers in this Alphabet

The Granny Alphabet, that is.

The editorial blurb from Amazon goes like this:  Spirited, stylish, sweet—here are granny archetypes of every stripe.

Of every stripe and plaid and check as well, if the sample pix on Amazon are anything to go by.

My namesake with her knitting. 

Call me crankytrousers, but I don't find this double volume set of photos and cartoons very charming at all. In fact, I find it more than a little creepy. I have nothing against "spirited, stylish and sweet"--okay, maybe I have something against sweet.  I don't have anything against old ladies in general, being one myself. If these dames want to dress up and have their pictures taken by some sweet-talking photographer, who am I to grouse?

So, why am I grousing?  Maybe its because the "granny archetypes" seem more like "granny stereotypes." As we all know, stereotypes exist because there is more than a grain of truth in them, but we don't all have canes, dowager humps, or straight from the 60's mink coats, or lie in bed surrounded by hatboxes as we await transport to the closet in the sky.

Or maybe it's the patronizing attitude behind the whole venture.  As though it is just so cute that someone who is old, old, old still wants to dress up and be seen, even if they look like something out of Monty Python. And, yes, by the way this whole enterprise is British and maybe "Granny" is a sub-culture there, like Goth or Surfer and I am just not getting it.

Excuse me while I cover myself in hand knits and take a few nips of the medicinal brandy as I ponder my own sorry position in the world of style.








This book was being flogged on one of my favorite blogs The Sartorialist, a photographer of street style who on occasion takes photos of older folk who catch his eye.  

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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.

Done with Downton

Okay, I'm a mean girl at heart.  I laughed when Matthew flew out of his snappy roadster and broke his neck at the end of Season Three.  I knew it was coming.  I had read that Dan Stevens was done with Downton and on to other things.

I decided I was done with Downton, as well. I just can't bring myself to watch a show where I want to slap more than 50% of the characters, no matter how much I enjoy seeing their costumes. 

More fun than a barrel of suppurating donkey meat with a soupçon of fox flesh.
But not much more fun.

So, I wasn't one of the twenty gazillion watching the Season 4 premiere last Sunday night.  I'm not saying that if I come down with a case of stomach flu a couple of months from now, and the room is reeling, and I am lying there sucking on ice chips that I won't succumb to a Downton binge. But right now I am looking forward to new seasons of House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black on Netflix.

Netflix is so much more civilized.  They release all the episodes on the same day and we, the customers, can choose how we want to watch. Why, it's almost like living in the future. 

And while I'm at it, why doesn't anyone say that someone who sits down and reads a book over the weekend is "binge-reading." It's as though binge-watching were something shameful, like eating thirteen pints of Ben & Jerry's at one sitting.