Ah, those were the good old days One of the local Oldies radio stations has started playing reruns of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. They were playing one from June 17, 1978 and it was likely one that I listened to when it first aired all those years ago. This was back when the Top 40 was an amazing mix of styles and artists, before music charts became so specialized that virtually anyone who releases a single will end up with a number one somewhere. I caught the top twenty or so songs of the broadcast, and I was surprised…
Category: random thoughts
Blood, Bone, & Butter
There are times while reading Blood, Bone, & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton that I find myself smiling from the simple pleasure of her prose. A good writer can tell you how she makes pasta. A great writer makes you want to dust the flour off your hands once she has finished telling you how she makes pasta. Gabrielle Hamilton is a great writer. The opening pages of Blood, Bone, & Butter paint an achingly beautiful portrait of an ideal life lived with the perfect family that you know it will go terribly wrong in short order. And when it does go…
Genghis Grill-In Awe of The Master
I’ve always been a fan of all you can eat places-who doesn’t love having more food than they can possibly eat? Genghis Grill sell their buffet as either one bowl-about the size of a cereal bowl- or all you can eat. The result is that some people don’t want to spend another couple of dollars and do their best to get all their money’s worth out the first bowl. I tend to get about one third meats and two thirds veggies and spices. There are 13 different forms of protein from shrimp and scallops to beef and sausage and chicken.…
Made in Dagenham
Among the Coming Attractions on the DVD of The King’s Speech was the trailer for Made in Dagenham. It looked like my kind of film, an underdog story, a cute British cast, and good old Bob Hoskins. I grew up in the 1970s with no father to speak of, a working mother, and an older sister who was quite taken with the women’s liberation movement. It is a bit shocking to see that male chauvinism and outright sexual discrimination was still going strong in 1968. For some reason I thought that whole Suffragette thing would have fixed this problem as…
The Woman Who Fell From The Sky
“Boy, those French: They have a different word for everything!” ~Steve Martin The Woman Who Fell From The Sky is the story of an amoral American home wrecker who moves to Yemen for a year to be the Editor of an English language newspaper. Ok, the homewrecking bit comes late in the story, but it cast it’s shadow over the entire book for me. Jennifer Steil encounters reporters who don’t read or write very good English, a culture where women are treated as third or fourth class citizens, and the fondness of everyone in Yemen for Qat-the mood altering drug…
Shop Class as Soulcraft
The story of a philosopher who seems a bit surprised that there are so few job openings at the Big Philosophy Companies and ends up becoming an electrician instead. After discovering that being an electrician is not really his calling, he moves on to being a motor cycle mechanic. But he never gives up his college training of being a philosopher. Matthew B Crawford fills all of his anecdotes with small asides of the great thinkers and uses as dry and technical a writing style as any college textbook. Shop class is mentioned only in passing and I don’t…
Paul-An Alien Road Picture
A man in black shoots a radio and says-It was a boring conversation anyway. Just one of the many inside sci fi, super nerd jokes in the silly sci-fi flick Paul. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who everyone seems to think are gay, find themselves in nerd heaven-Comicon in San Diego. As a nice follow up they decide to hit all the famous UFO sites in the western USA. They visit the the Little A’Le’Inn and The Black Mailbox and Vasquez Rocks where the reenact the battle between Captain Kirk and The Gorn. While at the Black Mailbox they see…
A Volcano, an Ice Cave, and Some Wolves
Tourist Stuff in New Mexico The Wife likes animal sanctuaries. I tend to have mixed feelings about them myself. For one thing none of them are made with Photographers in mind-a dozen shots of chain link fences with blurs behind them are not really worth bothering with. Of course, that’s how some of these places make a bit of money, by selling Photo Op Tours. I tend to like the places that are nothing but Photo Opts-like a Volcano with an Ice Cave. The Ice Cave is one of those private owned tourist attractions, but it has a lot of…
Sandia Peak Ski and Tramway
From the bottom of the hill the cables running up the side of the mountain don’t look all that impressive. The mountain itself doesn’t look all that impressive. But distance can have that effect. Once we are at the bottom of the hill where the boarding station sits, the mountain looks a good deal more impressive. The Sandia Peak Skyway cars are slightly larger versions of the Skycar rides commonly found at amusement parks and state fairs. The woman working in the car says that it holds fifty people, which seems a little on the optimistic side to me. With…
52 Loaves by William Alexander
The story of one man’s obsession to bake the perfect loaf of bread. Our hero ate a bit of bread at a fancy New York restaurant and was transported by it. He asked what it was called, and the waiter told him it was Peasant Bread. He then decided to bake his own Peasant Bread. The logical thing, call up the restaurant and ask if you can have their recipe, or Google peasant bread and see what kinds of recipes pop up, take a back seat to irrational exuberance. Over the course of 52 weeks, William Alexander decided to bake…