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.

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.

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.

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. 

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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Spies, Lies, & Cries

Mea Culpa

Trouserville's Department of Corrections, Amplifications, and Moderately Sincere Apologies would like to issue follow-ups to some previous posts.

1.  Spies (Happy To Be American) 

Well, I was so pleased to see that the secret court issued a now sort of public wrist-slap to the secret spies of NSA. Guess the judges weren't too impressed with the defense.  "Yes, indeed, we did indulge in a little bit of domestic overspying, but golly gee willikers, Mr. Judge, it was technical difficulties and we fixed them and plus we set up a compliance department and we now have 300 people making sure we don't over sneak." 

I think I'd feel more secure if they could bring back the spies of yesteryear! 

Not very secret spies Boris and Natasha

Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy

2.  Lies (Go DIrectly to Jail)

We don't need no stinkin' fact checkers; Trouserville's family and friends keep this blog on the straight and narrow.

I passed on what I thought was reliable dope from the Wall Street Journal regarding New Improved Monopoly Empire Now Without Go To Jail Cards.  Turns out it was just plain dopey unverified dope. I did drill down to the Hasbro website, but I missed the public outcry and the subsequent revelation that all is well:  you can still go to jail.  My sister informed me of this because she is a professional who pays attention to details, not a lazy oldster who only skims the silly news, and not even every day. You can read her accurate reporting in the Monopoly Empire post on her blog, Pink Slip.



3.  Cries (Compare and Despair No More)

I have been hewing to my resolve to compare and despair no more on the fitness front.  But that resolve was sorely tried by an article about James Kales, at age 98 a Senior Olympics medalist.  Here's the trying part:  although he did some field and track sports in his youth, he didn't take up tennis until he was 85,  and at the same time took up serious dancing. These activities (tennis six days a week, dancing three to five nights a week), plus a little bowling and sensible eating allowed him to bring home two gold, three silver, and one bronze medal in decathlon activities like shot put, discus, javelin. 

Sigh! I'm more than three decades younger and the only shot put I can handle is the shot I put in the gin & tonic.  Discus? Does flinging an old CD down as a coaster under the gin & tonic count?

Of course, this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, so take it for what it is worth. And just to avoid any future corrections Mr. Kales, much to his annoyance, did not actually win a medal in discus.

Book Me No Book

Stevie! Stevie! Stevie!  Yah makin' me crazee!  I wanna read yah book.  Fuh real. Only I don't, um, wanna book-book.  I wanna stuff it on my Kindle. Only, ya know, the papah-back won't fit in the USB port.

Dear Mr. King,

I don't consider myself a complete fangirl.  I haven't named my dog, Cujo. I don't have a tattoo of Christine the demonic car across my shoulders. And while I have a niece named Caroline, she never  has and never will be called Carrie.  At least by me.

I have not read even a tenth of the 112 books you have published, but I admire your story-telling abilities and writerly discipline. The Shining, without a doubt, is the scariest late-night reading ever. Red-rum. Red-rum. Maximum creep factor. (The movie version just made me laugh out loud, but I'm not sure how much you had to do with that.) You also get personal cred for being a Red Sox fan and for your charitable endeavors. 

So, Stephen,  what's up with the latest book?

Looking for a little light reading for a late-summer evening, I hopped onto Amazon to purchase one of your most recent books, Joyland. Well, knock me over with a card catalogue; it's not available as an e-book. Huh-whuh?

I know you have your reasons.  They are right there in the book description:


"I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime the perfect venue for this book, which is one of my favorites. I also loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we’re going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being. Joyland will be coming out in paperback, and folks who want to read it will have to buy the actual book." – Stephen King

Well, okay, there is a kind of a logic to that, and I get the noirish aesthetic angle. I loved paperbacks, too.  But right now I just don't want to buy an actual book.

Here's the deal:  I'm old. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. I don't want to go piling up stuff that my relicts will have to deal with. I like books that are invisible until I plunk the magic twanger and they magically appear, glowing in the dark.

Another thing is that it is summer.  The height of the tourist season here on lovely old Cape Cod. The nearest bookstore is miles and miles away, and, like I said, I'm old. I don't want to spend a half-hour trying to turn out onto or in from our lovely old Route 6. Talk about a clogged artery.  Nor do I want to spend over an hour making the ten-mile trip back from a possible fruitless outing to the nearest metropolis.

Yes, I could order it from Amazon.  I don't worry about the carbon footprint thing. The UPS truck is coming into this neck of the woods anyway. I order little things all the time in the summer--plastic storage containers, a watering can, a crochet hook--because I don't want to drive to a store which will be filled with tourists, one of whom has probably grabbed the last C2032 battery right from under my watery eyes. Or to a store that has the goods, but not in a version I can live with. I mean, really, do I look like the kind of gal who want to be using a baby-pink watering can? If this is the last watering can I ever buy, I want to like the color. 

But I just don't want to order something I don't want. Not even if you want me to. I'd like to have my own choice of reading experience. 

Maybe I will get to read the book someday. Maybe somebody I know will buy it and pass it on. Maybe I will trip across a copy later on this year. But for now, I'm afraid it's NO SALE.

Sincerely yours,

Kathleen "The Codger" Rogers

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."

Chain Gang Geezers

Inspired by some scintillating local news, I'm publishing some more crime of my tips for seniors to follow up on a previous post:  Chain Gang Grannies.

While the carnival of the Whitey Bulger trial continues down at the Federal Courthouse, it's the sideshow that is the more exciting at the moment with the revelation that "Stippo" Rakes did not commit suicide because he was despondent over being deprived of a chance to carry out his bucket list goal of testifying against the Whitester.  He did not commit suicide at all but was alledgedly given a cyanide iced coffee by his old buddy-boy and dead-beat debtor, William Camuti.

Camuti, aged 69, seems to have dropped some enormous electronic bread crumbs as to his doings, which led to his arrest.

Herewith, some additional tips for felonious fogeys.

1. Remember that the Internet may be invisible but it is eternal. 

Okay, Gramps, you went down to adult ed where some whippersnapper taught you how to find out useful stuff on the internet. Guess you bunked class the day they covered that pesky history trail that keeps a record of sites you surfed.  No wonder you're shocked that some other whippersnapper will then be able to find out that in between trolling for "adult entertainment" and checking up on the Red Sox you were Googling cyanide poisoning for fun and profit. 

2. Trust people if you must, but under no circumstances trust your devices.

Forget NSA, your GPS knows where you've been.

All those handy little electronic slaves who keep you on track, tell you when to take your Metamucil, and remind you to buy a birthday card for your bookie? The ones who talk to you, whistle at you, and answer your every question? They are little blabbermouths, without conscience and without fear, and they will rat you out much faster than a crooked cop or a jilted dame.

3.  Know your beverages.


Here's one thing Camuti got right: chain restaurant iced coffee is so vile that it makes a practical delivery system for  poison. 

Rich, bold flavor, indeed. 

Fallen? Can't Get Up?

Do I have the guy for you! 

Fell while rushing to answer the phone which had fallen
behind the seat cushions of his Lazy-Boy recliner.

Sorry, I can't introduce you by name, but he does have a lot to say for himself, as you can see from the following transcript of his weekly call, provided by Xfinity Voice Mail because I may be in my elder years, but do you think I am demented enough to pick up the phone when the caller is unknown and unidentified? Let alone get sucked into the slimy vortex of a monitoring contract on a no-name plastic panic button.

Voicemail from (622) 259-8471

"collin(?) I can't get a type of system you seen on TV. Looks like the system is been recommended by thousands of hospitals and medical professionals. Let's see says here that the systems already been paid for. Looks like you're getting the system because you do yourself a friend or family member or maybe even someone(?) you know who's experienced a fall in the past so again. It's already been paid for. So there's no cost to you whatsoever. Also says here that the shipping has already been paid f..."

If only my phone had super-spidey robo-rejecting powers!  But no. The phone line this call is coming in on is not living in the future, so we can't prevent these intrusions, and I am sure what is id'd as a "Phone Number" is just random garbage so why bother to complain. I wish I could forward the calls to "Kevin," the actual real-live nincompoop who calls here frequently to offer us power-washing services, promises to remove our number from the list, and calls again in a couple of weeks.  

You may have noticed that the transcript from Mr. Fallen is a bit, um, incoherent. It's not an artifact of Xfinity's voice recognition system which is pretty good, but having actually listened to this voice mail once, I can tell you that Mr. Fallen really does sound like he is a bit, um, in the bag.

Or perhaps it is he who has fallen and can't get up. I hope so.  I hope he lays there until he mummifies. Or maybe he already has.

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.

Happy To Be An American?

Yes!  Proud to be an American? Hm-m-m-m, let me think about that one.

I am grateful as can be to my not-so-distant ancestors who emigrated from the bogs of Ireland and the beet fields of Mittel-Europa when they did, arriving in the US where they made good, enabling me to live a life of privilege and prosperity.  Mostly, I love America. I can do without the Kardashians, but they are undeniably an All-American success story. 

I won't go on and on about all there is to love about the United States, from the Constitution and the BIll of Rights  to ice cream, apple pie and hotdogs for all, from sea to shining sea, although the rockets' red glare gives me a headache.

I especially like the First Amendment even though it means hearing some mighty stupid political remarks from time to time.



But back to the question of  whether or not I am proud to be an American. Today, the answer is "not so much." Bad enough that our phone calls and emails are being spied upon continually by the paranoid and sneaky gnomes of the NSA.  Bad enough that the weasels of Washington try to convince us that all this prying is a for our own good, as though we are a bunch of pre-schoolers who don't know enough to run out and play in the traffic. But the vomit icing on the garbage cake has got to be the monitoring of the mail.  

Under the Mail Isolation and Control Tracking program the exterior of every piece of mail processed, all 160 million pieces of it, is photographed.  In addition, the Mail Covers program allows any law enforcement official to request that postal workers record all information from the outside of envelopes and parcels before it is delivered. 

All this surveillance might explain why it takes so long for a birthday card to get from Boston to Philly, and perhaps why a Priority Mail parcel sent to me on June 14 has yet to arrive, but there is something offensive about monitoring that doesn't require any oversight whatsoever.  Yes, practically speaking, I could give a rat's ass if the government records the fact that I subscribe to the New Yorker or receive too many catalogs for old-age products, but why should there be a record of what banks I patronize, what charities I contribute to, or who sends me a Christmas card?

I knew that privacy is a thing of the past, a quaint little something that we could once take for granted, but there is a difference between being generally characterized by the zip code where you live and being specifically identified by drones whose job it is to spy on its own citizens for the United States government. 

That doesn't make me proud at all, it just makes me sick.

Chain Gang Grannies

A Trouserville Public Service Announcement

Fellow agesters, before you take up a life of crime, and end up as a Chain Gang Grannie or Grampy, make sure

1. you have enough marbles left to plan the caper

2.  you are still nimble enough to make a clean getaway

3.  that if you are going to steal a car, choose one that is large enough for your baggage

Don't follow the sad example of the fellow in Australia who, after purchasing a knife at Kmart, went into the parking lot and held a young woman up at knife point, but couldn't make a getaway before the police arrived because he couldn't get his walker and groceries into the car in time.

Oh, dearie me.  He's 0 for 3.

Here's another couple of tips:

4. If you are going to drive around stealing porch plants and garden gnomes, don't assume that your victims have poorer eyesight than you do, or at least rub some mud on your number plate.

An elderly man on a crime spree in Canton, Ohio, drove around taking things from people's porches and lawns, until one of his victims saw him in the act and wrote down his license plate number.

5.  Don't scoff the law in Great Britain.

According to an article in The Daily Mail, police there arrest 40 senior citizens a day for such heinous crimes as "overfilling a wheelie bin" or rollerblading to endanger.

6.  If all else fails, follow the example of the elder statesman of crime, Boston's own Whitey Bulger:  Don't trust anyone, and if you are caught just keep lying and laughing. 

Java Jive

Hi.  My name is Trouserville and I'm a coffee addict.

It started when I was fourteen with a daily thermos of black coffee smuggled into the Notre Dame Academy lunchroom.  In college, my roommate and I were the only ones in the entire dorm with our very own percolator. I am powerless in front of my need for caffeine. (Sob! Sniff! Whimper!)



Oh, give me a (coffee) break!

Just the other day I thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket made of cronuts.  Now I find out that according to the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)--the bible of the anything-for-a-billable-hour psycho-babbling professional--that I may be suffering from a psychiatric disorder.

Oh, wait, actual caffeine addiction didn't make it on to the official list, but, according to a Wall Street Journal article two other caffeine "disorders"--intoxication and withdrawal--got the nod.

This ain't the caffeine talking when I ask: is this the most moronic example yet of the attempts by the psycho establishment to pathologize, and thus monetize for themselves, the ups and downs of ordinary life.  As a side effect of this nincompoopery, actual disorders become trivialized. 

Is there anyone on the planet who ingests caffeeine who doesn't know that if you drink coffee every day and then stop drinking it you may well get a headache, or feel drowsy?  That it's not  a migraine, a brain tumor, encephalitis, Lyme disease, MS or anything else that should cause you to seek medical attention? That you are not headed for the dingbat roundup?

Guess not.  Guess there are some folk too stupid to know that if you want that particular headache to go away all you need is a cup of joe, a cola, or a chocolate covered espresso bean.  

It's nice to know that those poor schlubs can now go to an emergency room and be given a medical and psychiatric evaluation, perhaps including a blood test and an MRI, and then issued  a prescription which will presumably be paid for by their insurance or our tax dollars.  Maybe they can even get a free trip to caffeine rehab.  Instead of spending a buck at the Dunk or a fiver at Starbucks they can be given a prescription for what?  Hundred dollar caffeine pills? Fifty buck espressos?

Wake up and smell the coffee already.  And if you think coffee lovers are a bunch of raving lunatics, you have never heard The Ink Spots singing Java Jive:

I love coffee, I love tea

I love the java jive and it loves me

Coffee and tea and the jiving and me

A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!

And if listening to those cool dudes doesn't help your headache, Dr. Trousers says "Take a chocolate-covered espresso bean, and don't call me in the morning--at least not until I've had my coffee."

The Handbasket File

All official Trouservillians have that file, as in "the world is going to hell in a handbasket." If you don't have one yet, don't worry, it's issued with your Medicare card. Or, if you are natural born crankypants like me, you've had one for years.  Although I abandoned the physical file years ago, the items keep on coming.

Today's entry: Cronuts.  

Just seeing the headline in my sister's email, I assumed it was a new term for crazy-cranky old ladies:  Crone + Nuts. Turns out it is a cross between a donut and a croissant, and in the Big Applecore folks are standing in line for hours to purchase what amounts to a blob of flour, sugar, and grease.  

There are cronuts scalpers who turn around and sell them at a profit.  There are knockoffs: doissants.  And I am sure Mayor/Chief of the Nutrition Police Bloomberg is frothing at the mouth about this latest threat to the health of his city.

After all that standing on line, they can only purchase two because the management has decided to ration them, presumably to avert the Great Cronuts Massacre of 2013 in which thwarted patrons slug each other and the management with whatever the trend-obsessed New Yorker has to hand or foot--designer handbags, iPads, dog leashes, spike heeled Manolos. Or maybe it's just a clever marketing ploy to create scarcity and, thus, cachet.

Okay, maybe I'm old, but I don't get it.  No matter how rare, or how tasty, no baked good is worth waiting in line for.  In my Cape Cod town there is a bakery (closed two days a week) where demented vacationers wait for an hour or so in a line that features voracious green flies, but not so far as I know scalpers, to get a baguette or a croissant.  What for?  The bragging rights? The bread is decent, but it's not the only decent bread in the county.  

If you live in NYC, where a lot of folks live in apartments the size of storage lockers, maybe it does make more sense to stalk a piece of pastry to flaunt your up-to-the-minuteness.

I also think that Americans just like to make a competition out of anything.  If you can't get on to a reality TV show,  you can make your own little drama by scoring the most scarce and trendiest sugar bomb and boasting about it.  

"Those crumbs all over my pants? Oh, that must be the Cronut."  

"Excuse me while I lick my fingers.  Those Cronuts are a bit sticky you know." 

"Oh, yes, we scored a dozen Cronuts . Would you like to buy a raffle ticket? Only a hundred dollars. We're starting a vacation fund. We hear there's a great little town on Cape Cod where you can wait in line for baguettes. "

I'll wave to them as I drive by on my way out of town.

Older Than Dirt?

Not me. For every day that brings some disastrous scientific news about why I am doomed because of my diet, my personality, or my hair color, there is a day like today. A day when they discover something that makes me feel so much better--younger, handsomer, more cosmopolitan.

A couple of months ago it was the baby picture of the universe, which pushed the age of the universe up by a few billion years or so.

Aww-ww--ww! It looks just like a blueberry lemon-lime jelly bean.

Today, I found out that we're all Asian. How sophisticated is that? Asia is where our proto-primate ancestor came from. Then it went over to Africa and came down out of the trees. 

Not only that but it is 55 million years old and looks like something the folks at central casting sent  over for an eco-horror flick.  

I am Tarsier the Elder and I will cut off your snout with this leaf.

Well, all I can say is that even on my baddest bad hair day or my draggiest morning after the night before, I never looked as weird as that particular ancestor.  Then again . . . .

Hate that gray? Fry it away!
My head baking at the hair salon.
No, it didn't turn out hot pink, just brown and blond and red all over.

My New Mantra

My New-woo-woo Age days are long gone.  Haven't seen those chakra crystals in years.  Hope I didn't mistake them for candy. I'm as likely to levitate as to meditate and all the weirdo books have been passed on or reincarnated. That doesn't mean I can't have a mantra.  You know, a nice, comforting little catchphrase to help negotiate the downward spiral.

Thanks to my nieces, who keep me au courant with You Tube, I now have a doozy. Not only do I have a mantra, but I share it with a totem animal:  Honey Badger.  Not Honey Boo-Boo, although I'm sure she would make a fine totem and she does generate a steady stream of mantra-worthy comments ("a dollah makes me hollah"), but Honey Badger.

Honey Badger is some kind of Asian weasel and the subject of many a nature video. I won't get sidetracked here by praising the glory of an economic system which allows this guy, Randall, to parlay one amusing YouTube video--a snarky voiceover on a low-budget nature video with over 59 million views--into some kind of media empire, complete with apps, contests, books, swag, and whatever else constitutes success these days. 

I want to concentrate on what I learned from Randall and Honey Badger. 

What I learned was this suitable-for-almost-every-occasion mantra: Honey Badger don't care; Honey Badger don't give a $#!+.

This is an excellent motto for growing older, don't you think?  It sure comes in handy for me.

Can't find the car keys?  HBDC. Repeat it long enough and the car keys will appear, or I'll lose all interest in wherever it was i was headed.

Don't feel like going to the condo's annual meeting? HBDGAS. Don't worry.  If there is something I need to know, I'll get a notice or I can gossip with the super.

Donate to this or that charity not already on my list? Answer this or that survey? Iron those pillowcases? Rate that tee shirt purchase? Fruit or ice cream for dessert? Paper or plastic? 

Thanks to Honey Badger, I don't have to devote one minute of my allotted span to worthless activities or pointless decisions. 

I just mutter that mantra and waddle on.