The gift that keeps on giving

Around Thanksgiving time I was asked to make a Christmas list. I resisted at first as I really don't need anything, and if I want something, I generally just go buy it.

But who am I to deprive my loved ones of the joy of giving? So I made a list of things it would be pleasant to have. It wasn't until last evening when I came across my list that I realized I got pretty much everything on it. I am delighted with and grateful for every gift I received, but guess which present I have gone absolutely bonkers over. Yes -- the one not on the list, the one, in fact, I would never have listed because I would never have known about it. And what is it that brings me such joy?

BuckyBalls.

That's what I said: BuckyBalls -- 216 small, round rare-earth magnets that you can string together, pull apart, form into shapes (hexagons a specialty), and just generally play with.

The magnet/toy/puzzle BuckyBalls are different from but based on the chemistry/physics/phi buckyballs which are named for Buckminster Fuller (of the ball-like geodesic dome) and which are all about Carbon 60 molecules, truncated icosahedrons and other scientific gibberish.

Science, schmience -- all I know is BuckyBalls are a gas, and I own my very own set now.

Another one of my favorite Christmas presents, the knife sharpener, works real well. That dull old knife I sharpened with it yesterday now slices fingers effortlessly. I'll be back playing with my BuckyBalls again just as soon as the Band-Aids come off.

'Tis the Season

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he is Parson Brown...

Been hearing that song a lot lately, of course, and that particular snatch of lyric always puts me in mind of a misconception I held as a small child.

I didn't know the word "parson," so I ran with what I did know and just assumed that "parson brown" was a color -- in fact, a particular shade. You know -- dark brown, chocolate brown, parson brown.

Apparently my young mind required only some interpretation of individual words, but not that they make any logical sense. I do not recall ever wondering why someone would make a snowman and then pretend it was brown.

There was another Christmas song that forced me to rethink when I got older. From it, I concluded that history was some sort of deep hole in the ground because, as the song said, Rudolph was going to go down in it.

If only my mind was as supple now as it was then.

Inventor Wanted

Somebody needs to invent something that can make things dry as fast as water can make them wet.

I'm picturing an open but defined space between two things -- a sender and a receiver, that sort of thing. You put something that is wet between the putter and the getter, and some sort of technologically miraculous conductor-thingies pass between them bombarding the wet thing with some sort of sub-nucleic particles -- probably with a nice glow of white light -- and ZAP! Completely dry, whatever it is.

We could call it the DryBoneBlipper.

You'd want a small one in the kitchen. Wash a dish in sudsy water, rinse it under the tap, then pass it through the DryBoneBlipper and -- Flash! Put it right back in the cupboard, because it's dry as a bone.

You'd want a big one in the bathroom. You would step out of the shower dripping wet, stand on the combination emitter/acceptor with the combination blower/sucker above your head, say "Dry me now!" and the voice-activated on-switch would flip itself, and WHAMMO! Dry! Go get dressed!

Once we get this thing working, we start selling franchises for the DryBoneAutoBlipper -- an industrial-sized sub-nucleic-particle thrower/catcher mechanism that comes at the end of the traditional wet car wash. Oh yeah, baby -- no more of those honkin' fans for us.

I mean it. Somebody really needs to invent that.

Homophone T.E.

A reader has questioned my use of trouper in the previous blog, suggesting I might have meant trooper when I complimented my tiny dog for going out in the snow.

Willing to consider the (remote) possibility that I could be wrong, I dutifully looked up both words. All definitions of trooper relate to military-type troops while trouper refers to an actor in a troupe (think Vaudeville) and, by extension, therefore, is said of someone who is dedicated to the proposition that the show must go on.

I will head off the only possible source of homophonic confusion that I see in this blog by stating that I do mean compliment (say something nice) and not complement (full quantity).

I also know the difference between effect and affect, but I don't think I will ever straighten out lie, lay, laid and lain. Lost cause. I'll never get it. So, I will avoid those altogether and use set when I mean lie, lay, laid or lain and repose supine or repose prone when I am too tired to think about it anymore.

Today's Question

We got about eight inches of snow Sunday, not as much as some other places, but enough to close the schools (as usual), and then, of course, the temperature dropped significantly. The sun shone on Monday, but the high temperature for the day was 16ºF. The roads were a mess for the morning and evening commutes. It was not a lot better this morning.

And here I am again – wondering, as I have for decades, just why it is that anybody would choose to live in a place where this sort of thing can happen. Why doesn’t the entire population of the earth live within 200 miles of the equator?

Yes, I know why I’m living here, and if I have my way, I won’t be dying here.

As for closing the schools every time a flake falls, don’t get me started.

But here’s the news that is really worthy of note: At 6:30 this morning when it was still dark out and the temperature was a brisk 8ºF, my tiny dog, my delicate little princess of a pooch who hates to get her precious little toes wet and spends most of the winter sleeping under a blanket, went out the door and stood in two inches of snow to pee. I don’t even care that she did it on the deck. What a little trouper she is.

Good girl! Good dog! Way to pee!

Retail Tale

I left J. G. McCrory out of my list of dime stores the other day. It seems that a bunch of guys (Kresge, Murphy and Newberry) got their starts working at McCrory stores.

Speaking of retail, I heard on NPR this morning that The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, has filed for Chapter 11. Not going under, just looking to fix themselves up.

A&P was never my favorite. My mother preferred Jewel, possibly because her father once worked for the Jewel Tea Company, so I did too. I don't know what Grampie did for them. Maybe he was a Jewel Tea Man. I remember the Jewel Tea Man coming to our house in his brown truck when I was quite young. Actually, I think the National Tea Man did too. After a while they gave that up and just opened stores.

It’s interesting that most grocery store chains are local or regional, although many of them are subsidiaries of others – Kroger owns a bunch with different names.

How about this bit of oddball trivia: Winn-Dixie, which is the iconic grocery store in the deep south, was founded in Idaho.

When I was a small child, I decided that Piggly Wiggly was the stupidest imaginable name for a grocery store. I still think so.

Another One

It's 12-11-10. I had something to say about this a few months ago -- I think it was around 8-9-10, maybe. I don't really remember.

Holiday cookie baking is in full swing. So far we have chocolate chip, peanut butter, and Margarita cookies, and a couple bushels of Chex mix. Oh, and a small bucket of oyster cracker snack mix too, ranch flavor, of course.

My grandmother used to call them oisture crackers (rhymes with moisture). She also called Kresge's "kress-idge." How many of us are old enough to remember S. S. Kresge? That's what became K-Mart.

What was it with the initials for five-and-dimes? S. S. Kresge, F. W. Woolworth, J. J. Newberry, W. T. Grant, G. C. Murphy, Ben Franklin. Oops. Well, lots of them had initials.

I wonder how J. C. Penney got upgraded to a department store.

Back to holiday baking. Peanut brittle next.

Fighting TB My Own Way

According to the New York Times, it was on this date in 1907 that Christmas Seals went on sale for the first time, at the post office in Wilmington, Delaware, to raise money to fight tuberculosis. When I read that this morning it brought back a memory ...

I was very young, probably under three. My mother and I had stopped (while walking home from shopping, probably) at a house up the block, just for a minute, my mother said, because there was something she had to say or do or give to the woman who lived there. We didn’t take our coats off, because we weren’t going to stay long.

Well, those two young housewives got to talking, of course, and I was bored out of my mind, of course. The woman had a little boy about my age, and while our mothers chatted near the front door, he and I entertained ourselves in a nearby room by licking the back of several sheets of Christmas Seals and gluing them to the top of the table.

I don’t remember what happened after that. Perhaps our mothers’ reactions were so violent that I’ve repressed it, or maybe they just thought it was funny.

But every now and then over the last 60 years, I’ve wondered how that woman was able to scrape those Christmas Seals off of that table top. They were glued on there good. I saw to that.

But would Ogden Nash have liked it?

Looks like cookies have dominated the blog lately. Well, cookies dominate my life sometimes, like this coming weekend, which is our annual holiday cookie-baking extravaganza. That’s when even we don’t have enough measuring cups to go around.

And speaking of measuring, I came across a recipe on the internet with this direction:

Roll out to a thickness of about 5 mm, and cut into 3" triangles.

Excuse me? Wouldn't that be 8 cm triangles? Or 1/4" thickness? Pick one or the other and stick with it.

There should be a name for that. How about mixed metric-phor?

How To Make A Stale Cookie

I began to believe that Lofthouse cookies could never go stale. I thought that each and every one of them would always impart its own delightfully soft, crumbly sweetness with each bite every time, all the time.

But the one I just ate, although permissible from a food-poisoning point of view, was actually...well, not quite fresh.

I put that particular cookie in my lunch box, safely sealed in a sandwich-size Ziploc baggie, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. For some reason I didn't eat it that day. I didn't eat anything out of my lunchbox until Monday of this week, at which time I discovered that my habits of consumption over the long holiday weekend had pushed the needle on the bathroom scale past acceptable limits.

I, therefore, embarked upon a sort of quick-fix pretend diet where I ate celery instead of chips with my sandwich and abstained from those things generally referred to as "treats" that I always have in my lunchbox, like little packages of cheesy crackers, Hostess cupcakes, and, yes, Lofthouse cookies, and tried to eat almost nothing after supper each evening.

Having found this morning that the bathroom scale was no longer overly burdened, but not wanting to undo what I had worked so hard all week to achieve, I still brought celery to provide the crunch with my lunch. I was still hungry, however, and I decided a sweet treat was allowable.

So I dug the Lofthouse cookie out of my lunch box and ate it. With the results already discussed.

I think I thought Lofthouse cookies never went stale because we never had them in the house longer than a couple days.

But as promised -- I believe I have provided adequate proof that you can make a Lofthouse cookie go stale.

Russian Tea Cakes

In my mother’s recipe box, there is a card with a recipe for cookies called Russian Tea Cakes. The recipe is attributed to one Agnes Scebold. My mother rented a room from Agnes when she worked in a defense plant in Chicago during World War II. I remember the recipe because it is so similar to a cookie that I make.

I got an e-mail today with links to various cookie recipes at bettycrocker.com. One is called Russian Tea Cakes. Hm. I checked it out, and it is exactly the same as Agnes’s recipe, to the letter -- same ingredients, same amounts, same oven temp, same baking time, same every detail.

These cookies are short, contain finely chopped nuts, and after baking are covered in powdered sugar.

This is not a unique cookie. Apparently any chopped nut will do for Russian Tea Cakes, but if you use pecans, you get Mexican Wedding Cookies. If you use almonds and shape them into horns instead of balls, you get almond crescents. That's what I make, but I call them rohlíčky, which is Bohemian for "horn" and is what my Bohemian family always called them.

So how did Agnes and Betty end up with exactly the same recipe for a cookie with exactly the same name? Well, I can't see Betty Crocker stealing a recipe from a Chicago housewife who has probably been dead for 50 years.

So I am forced to conclude that Agnes got the recipe off a bag of Gold Medal flour, or some other General Mills product. But obviously Betty Crocker has gotten a lot of mileage out this recipe over the years.

Here it is:

Russian Tea Cakes
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2-1/4 cups Gold Medal® all-purpose flour
3/4 cup finely chopped nuts
1/4 teaspoon salt
powdered sugar

Heat oven to 400ºF.

Mix butter, 1/2 cup powdered sugar and the vanilla in large bowl. Stir in flour, nuts and salt until dough holds together.

Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Place about 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until set but not brown. Remove from cookie sheet. Cool slightly on wire rack.

Roll warm cookies in powdered sugar; cool on wire rack. Roll in powdered sugar again.

Makes 4 dozen cookies


I'll bet mine are better, though. Want that recipe? Let me know.

Murder, She Reads

The ideal murder mystery is set in one of those small English villages with a ridiculous name, like Chipping Cleghorn, which is dominated by the large manor house on the hill that has been in the same family for generations, possibly since the Conquest, and in which lives the old patriarch of the family, who may or may not be titled, and who may or may not be an invalid and who may or not have just changed his will; his very-much-younger-than-he is second wife; the spineless, stodgy older son, who is taking over the family business or title or property, and his ambitious wife; the ne’er-do-well younger son who has just returned home after a number of years in Canada or South Africa or the Argentine, and the woman he brings with him to whom he may or may not be married and about whom nothing is known; the ingénue, a pretty young great-niece or ward of the patriarch who, by the end of the story, will have fallen in love with the local young doctor; plus the butler, the housekeeper, the housemaids, the cook, the gardener and the chauffeur. Somebody bumps off the old man, and you have to figure out whodunit.

And if it’s written by Agatha Christie, that’s best of all.

That Holiday Again

At one time in my life I summed up my attitude toward Thanksgiving by asking, "Thankful to whom, and for what?"

The first part of the question stemmed from the religious overtones of the holiday, which I find objectionable, and the second part reflected my belief that I didn't have much to be thankful for even if I knew whom to thank.

Well, not any more. Today I give thanks to my partner for allowing me to be in charge of the mashed potatoes for our turkey dinner as well as everything else that is worthwhile in my life.

Thanks, JB. Happy Thanksgiving.

On this date in history

November 22, 1963. It's one of those things. People remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.

I was a senior in high school. I had just finished lunch and was on my way to choir practice. At one point some sort of bottle neck caused the streams of students to come to a brief halt, and I found myself facing a girl I knew only casually.

She was smiling in an agitated sort of way, and she said to me excitedly, "Did you hear Kennedy's been shot?" I shook my head, thinking it was a joke, but before she could deliver the punch line, we both got swept along. I wondered why on earth somebody who hadn't talked to me since the sixth grade would suddenly want to tell me a joke as we passed in the hallway.

Shortly after choir rehearsal began, the principal came over the PA system to announce that the president was dead. Some of the girls wept. Our director asked us to join him in a minute of silent prayer, after which he carried on with the rehearsal.

For the record, I believe it was a conspiracy, Oswald did not act alone, and the Cubans were behind it.

I'll bet that girl has not thought of me once in the last 47 years, and there is no reason why I should remember her either. We were not friends; we basically each knew who the other one was.

But she is linked in my mind and memory with the event of that day . I do remember her. I remember her name. I can see her face.

Equal Time for Mom

Today is my mother’s birthday. Since I mentioned my dad’s birthday last month, I thought I shouldn't let the day go by.

She was born in 1921, which means she would have been 89 today. It’s hard to imagine her as a very old woman because she was only 49 years old when she died.

However, her birth was duly noted on page 4 of the Montgomery News, a weekly newspaper published in Hillsboro, county seat of Montgomery County, Illinois, on November 25, 1921:

Local Notes
Mrs. Ralph Weatherford, who was formerly Miss Blanche Hefley, came home to see her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Turner Hefley, and old Doc Stork played a joke on her by leaving a little girl at Turner’s house, and the little tot was such a handsome “joke” that Ralph and his wife concluded to keep her and name her Elizabeth Anna.

They don’t write birth announcements like that no more. Thank God.

Shall we live lively or long? (And what's wrong with both?)

I used to know a man who wanted very badly to be a wild party animal, but some sort of innate sense of responsibility held him back, at least until the weekend. He even confided to me that he wished a doctor would tell him he had only six months to live, because he could then abandon all pretense and embark upon a non-stop binge of drunken and licentious carousing with no concern for the consequences to his employment, his reputation, or his health.

I suggested he go ahead and do it even without the fatal diagnosis since after a few months of that sort of riotous living, he'd probably be dead anyway.

As far as I know, he never did.

And then there is Miss Hathameyer who has shared with me the dilemma upon the horns of which she now finds herself. Looking ahead to her retirement from the work-a-day world, she admits that her one desire is to become the definitive couch potato. She wants to do absolutely nothing, or as close to nothing as she possibly can, all day, every day. She has heard, however, that people who are completely inactive after retiring do not live as long as those who remain active.

And she wants to live a long time so that she has more years to do absolutely nothing.

She's working on that one and will get back to me. And then I'll get back to you.

inconsistently Neurotic

I have noticed that before I broke my arm, I generally put blog titles in sentence case. Post-fracture, I am trending toward title case.

I dislike inconsistency. However, I wonder if I would appear delightfully eccentric, even madcap, if I never settled on one or the other style.

Whilst pondering this problem, I snacked on a small bag of cheese crackers. In this I was consistent: I picked out and ate all the broken crackers first, saving the whole ones for last. How neurotic is that?

But -- I have a follow-up to the Aunt Blanche blog. Imagine how grown up I feel with a blog follow-up.

With regard to Aunt Blanche, avid reader Kristin M. of Rochester, Minnesota, (yes, my niece) reminded me about her pronunciation of the word license, but I did have to point out to said favorite niece that it wasn't just Aunt Blanche. The entire Knez family -- in fact, the entire Bohemian enclave in which they lived (Berwyn, Cicero) -- apparently lacked the required linguistic aptitude to be able to say it correctly, so that it came out lyce-ness. As in, I have to renew my driver's lyce-ness.

Everybody on my mother's side, on the other hand, could say license correctly but complained of frequent congestion in the bronical tubes.

However, NOBODY -- and I mean not one single person -- on either side of the family was ever caught saying noo-cue-ler for nuclear.

Perhaps that's why none of us was ever elected President.

Something I'll never understand

If you drive around mid-Michigan where I live, you will see these metal boxes here and there along the road. I have always presumed they have something to do with the electric utility since they are often at country intersections that have street lights and/or stop lights. I've seen them near the street in people's yards too, though.

They come in various sizes, but most are about as wide as a washing machine, but not as deep. Those usually have one door. Wider ones often have two doors.

They will have some identifying numbers on them, usually those cheap gold-on-black 3-inch tall self-stick things you peel the backing off of and stick onto your house or mailbox.

Around here they are painted green. The elements transform it into a dull, pale color.

There is nothing about them that is aesthetically appealing.

So, that must be why somebody (the manufacturer, one presumes) has decided they would look better if their doors were covered with what looks like wood-grain contact paper. Not the whole box. Just the front panel.

Who are we kidding here?

Slapping some wood-grain contact paper on the front is not making those boxes any more attractive. Or maybe that's not the point. Maybe this disguise is supposed to fool us into thinking it's a tree stump.

Who comes up with this stuff?

Frankfurter's Weenie Hotdogs, Doggonit

Here are my three favorite ways to eat a hotdog – and these are in no particular order:

The familiar (and arguably definitive) hotdog on a bun.

Next, the hotdog sandwich. This involves bread surrounding one or more hotdogs, which are either split lengthwise and placed between two pieces of bread, or the simpler (one might even say more primitive) version in which you simply roll a piece of bread around the hotdog.

Then there is the perpendicularly-impaled weenie. This is the way I grew up eating hotdogs. You stick your fork right in the middle of it, dip one end in a condiment and take a bite; give the fork a 180° turn, dip the other end and take a bite; repeat until there are no bites left.

Now that my table manners are a little more polished, I have refined this method. I no longer pick up the entire hotdog on my fork but very daintily cut bite-size pieces as I go.

Now, as if the foregoing were not spectacularly spellbinding by itself, the really fascinating thing is that if I eat a hotdog on a bun or with bread, I put mustard on it.* If eating the plain hotdog one bite at a time, I dip it in ketchup.

Ketchup? What is that about? I put ketchup on absolutely nothing. I do not put ketchup on French fries. I do not like ketchup on meatloaf. I don’t even like ketchup very much.

Is the presence or absence of bread as a delivery mechanism the difference? Or is it just a throwback to my childhood?

If I’m really throwing back, then I should stop microwaving hotdogs and boil them in a pan of water on the stove, just like Mother used to do back in the day.

It should not go without saying that hotdogs are among my favorite things to eat. My father used to call them “tube steaks.”

Yes, very droll was he.

_____________________
*And occasionally peanut butter, but that is for another time.

All Hallows' Eve

I dislike Halloween. I really do.

For the past 25 or 30 years I've told people that my dislike of it stems from all those Halloween-motif birthday parties I had when I was a kid. My birthday is the next day, you see -- November 1.

On the other hand, I remember liking Halloween at one time in my young life. I trick-or-treated in the neighborhood and was pleased with the haul I took in. I'll never forget the woman on the next street over who was giving cans of soda pop. That's when cans of soda pop were new and unusual.

As I look back now, I remember disliking answering the door when kids came trick-or-treating, especially if there were big kids at the door. And I've never been interested nor more than faintly amused by grown-ups dressing up for Halloween at the office or in stores and restaurants.

Maybe I'm just too sophisticated and urbane for Halloween. Yeah. I'm sure that's it.

However, I can never let the day go by without marking its importance in my life. Today is the 58th anniversary of the day I got my first pair of glasses. It was on Halloween in 1952, the day before my sixth birthday.

And I've been seeing happily ever since.

Beer Shots

OK, I cannot be the only person in the world who drinks beer shots.

I Googled beer shots and beershots, drinking beershots and drinking beer shots, and I got nothing much to go on.

There were many references to a shot in the beer, as my father would have said.

Reminds me of a time we were visiting my grandparents, my mother's parents, in downstate Illinois. On Saturday afternoon my dad and grandfather decided to take a walk, and I went with them. Not by design -- neither of them was much of a drinker -- we ended up in a local tavern where the three of us sat at the bar. I was about 11 and probably had to be helped up onto the stool. The bartender looked at Grampie who said, "Beer," and then at Dad who said, "Beer," and then at me. My father said, "Give her a shot in the beer."

The very earnest old barkeep got real serious and said, "Oh, no! Sorry, sir, I can't do that. Now, I can sell it to you and you can take it home for her to have." My father just shook his head and ordered me a Coke.

Anyway, my Google got me a shot in the beer, also things like ...beer, shots, and wine... and not much else. There is apparently a beershots.com, but I'm not sure what they are about. They do say they are interested in finding talented writers. Maybe I should apply.

So, back to the point, if any -- for my beer shots you need a shot glass -- 1-1/2 ounces is good. From a can or bottle of beer, pour yourself a shot; drink; repeat.

Now, how fun is that?

Well, get this. I have also been known to drink 7-Up shots. So there.

Oh, yeah, you think so?

I have noticed that in e-mails and letters and even in this very blog, I have a tendency to begin paragraphs with the singular personal pronoun.

I am doing it on purpose now, of course, to illustrate my point.

I occasionally go back and change the sentence structure in order to avoid this problem, or I will sometimes simply add some throw-away word such as "Well" or "So" or "Anyhow" to the front of the sentence.

I am convinced that if I notice it, the reader must also notice it, and I am so afraid that it will lead people to conclude that I am a screaming egomaniac.

I am not a screaming egomaniac. I never scream.

I am willing to bet one hundred billion dollars that upon reading this, the inimitable Judy Brown is softly singing to herself, "You're so vain, you prob'ly think this blog is about you..."

Well, you know what? It is.

L distal radius fx, and its aftermath

I have just noticed that blogs I posted before I broke my arm generally have titles in sentence case, whereas in post-fracture blogs, I have put them in title case.

What do you suppose happens to a person during recovery from a fracture that results in a complete change in their personal sense of capitalization?

I wonder if I could get a government grant to study this.

I dislike inconsistency in general, although I suppose that the occasional mixing of cases might lend an air of whimsy to a blog of this sort, especially considering the staid and stuffy bookshelf that appears as its background.

Aren't you absolutely sure those books are dusty?

There is one, though, in the lower left that I recognize. Here's the one I mean:




It's an 1897 edition of selected poems of Christina Rossetti. I'd know it anywhere -- no broken bone can upset my poetical applecart.

Just suppose ...

Some friends and I recently maligned the ignoramuses who say supposably when they mean supposedly.

I think I’ve secretly harbored the notion that there is no such word as supposably. I may have been encouraged in this belief by spell checkers, including the one this blog uses. However, I got to thinking that a back-formation would take me from supposably to supposable, and that is a word.

I, therefore, consulted a real book dictionary (Webster’s New Collegiate), and it confirmed my suspicions. Supposably is a word. As I presumed, it is the adverbial form of supposable, which is the adjectival form of suppose. Something is supposable if it is capable of being supposed.

The verb suppose generally takes an object; the adjective generally modifies a noun; and the adverb -- ah, that's the tricky one. It modifies anything except a noun, but usually a verb.

So --

I suppose (v.) he is dead.

His being dead is supposable (adj.).

I supposably (adv.) offer (v.) that he is dead.

OK -- it's a word, but it does not mean the same thing as nor can it be used interchangeably with supposedly.

And it is making my head hurt.

Unleaven That Bread, Madam!

I wanted something crispy but with little flavor of its own to have with hummus. In his New York Times column, Mark Bittman had a recipe for olive-oil matzo that I decided to try. There was even a video in which he made it look easy to do.

My attempt was not wildly successful. I didn’t roll the first batch thin enough, and I thought it would never bake. Subsequent attempts were thinner but never got as crispy as I wanted.

So the next day, thinking somebody who knew about matzo might be able to give me a tip or two about making it, I called a co-worker who is Jewish. Here is what she said:

“You made matzo? Nobody makes matzo. Matzo comes in a box in the grocery store. I don’t know anybody who makes their own matzo.”

I abandoned matzo making, but then not long ago on the Internet I ran across a recipe for unleavened bread among several recipes Maria von Trapp had included in her autobiography. I was hoping for insight to improve my luck with Bittman’s matzo, but I really got stumped on this one. After combining flour, salt, butter, egg, and water, Frau von Trapp says to …

“… mix dough quickly with a knife, then knead on board, stretching it up and down to make it elastic until it leaves the board clean. Toss on a small, well-floured board. Cover with a hot bowl and keep warm 1/2 hour or longer. Then cut into squares of desired size and bake in 350-degree oven until done.”

I’m moving right past mixing it with a knife (a knife?) and going straight for tossing it onto a small board. I picture a lump of dough that is compact enough to sit on a small board under a hot bowl. And then 30 minutes later when I remove said bowl, how will this lump have miraculously become something I can cut into squares?

Undaunted, I Googled for unleavened bread recipes, hoping somebody could shed light on this technique. I could not find anything remotely similar, but – and here finally is what set me about relating this tale -- I did find one really remarkable recipe at cooks.com for unleavened bread that calls for two ounces of yeast. I think somebody has completely missed the point there.

Who’da thunk recipes for matzo could be so entertaining?

P.S. Did you know that egg white is considered a leavening agent when whipped?

Mrs. Malaprop, I Presume?

My Aunt Blanche has a way at words.

She is 83 years old now and lives in Washington in a tree -- well, amid the trees on the Olympic Peninsula. And she says the darnedest things. Here are some of my favorite Aunt Blanche-isms:

• She gives every year to the Salivation Army.
• She felt like she was stuck between a rock and a hot plate.
• You can save money by buying genetic brands.
• In a movie she saw, an octopus grabbed a guy with its technicals.
• Buying is better than renting because you always have iniquity in the house.
• Those darned soota-pharmical companies are making a fortune.
• Even though it is narrow, the cars go down that street two at a breast.
• She was so surprised she jumped up like a ton of bricks.

Just poking a little gentle fun -- I love my Aunt Blanche, who is warm and fun-loving and generous and has always been very good to me. And I love it that she says funny things and says things funny.

As she once said about someone else -- she's a piece o' art.

Disjunct and Fugitive, Both

I’ve got a couple things on my mind today, not related to one another.

For one thing, I need a solution to the problem of my baloney sandwich coming apart. This happens to me every time. The baloney is cemented to both slices of bread with mustard, but where the meat meets the meat, it is very slippery, and when I pick it up to take a bite, all of a sudden I’ve got slip-‘n-slide going on, two pieces of sandwich heading in different directions, and mustard all over me.

The other thing is I didn’t have time yesterday to remark upon it being October 13, my father’s birthday. He would have been 98 years old (if he hadn’t died in 1978).

Well, there might be some commonality here after all. My dad liked a good sandwich, which, incidentally, the way he pronounced it sounded more like sanwidge.

My father's idea of a sandwich was a one-inch stack of meat between two pieces of bread. That's all. No mustard, no mayonnaise, no lettuce, no nothin' else. Bread and meat, and lots of it. One day he told my mother, who made lunches for us to carry to work and school every day, that he wished she’d put more meat on his sandwich. She promised to do better, and the next day when he sat down for lunch with the fellas at work, he found two thick slabs of left-over meatloaf with a slice of bread between them.

Maybe that was the original sanwidge.

You never wanted to tempt my mother, especially when it came to food. I once complained that her peanut butter sandwiches had all the peanut butter in the middle and none around the edges, so that I ended up eating plain bread crust. My next sandwich had gobs of peanut butter all around the edges and nothing in the middle.

If I ever open a restaurant, the lunch menu will say:

SANWIDGES
Perimeter Peanut Butter
Meatloaf with Bread
Sliding Lunch Meat

Made Better Most of the Time

Better Made potato chips are made in Detroit, Michigan. They are beloved by people from Michigan because they are made in Michigan. Better Made products can be seen in some of the tourist-attraction television ads touting "Pure Michigan," that's how proud Michigan is of them.

Hey -- they are the recipients of the Rachael Ray Best Salt and Vinegar Chip Award. What else do you need to know? Their website also mentions other awards, including "Detroit Free Press Best Potato Chip 2002-2007."

So, it's 2010 -- what has happened since? I'll tell you what. Quality control went down the toilet, that's what. Even though they are cheap in Michigan (because they're so often on sale) and even though the plain chips are thin and crispy just like I like 'em and have the best potato flavor of any chip I ever had, we stopped buying the brand because every bag seemed to contain way too many inedible pieces of potato yuck.

Well, last time we were in the grocery store, I was appalled by the price of Frito-Lay products, so I grabbed a bag of Better Made chips.

I had some with my sandwich today. Is there anything better than a thin, crispy, perfectly salted, potato-y tasting chip with braunschweiger on rye? Huh? I ask you.

But I digress. I had some of those chips at lunch today, and I'm here to tell you, Better Made are the best chips I've ever had. Yes, I've had Mike-Sells. Yes, I've had Charles Chips. These are better.

There is only one thing I like more than Better Made potato chips: Better Made potato sticks. But I think I'll leave that for another day.

Not to be outdone by Rachael, I hereby bestow upon Better Made Potato Chips of Detroit, Michigan, the Jan Knez Zowee! Award.

Oh, Puh-LEASE!

This is a special message to the driver -- no, the owner (just in case they are not one and the same) of the 2010 Lexus that was in front of me on the way to work. That is, specifically, the 2010 Lexus with the license plate 1 LEXUS.

Did it occur to you that putting LEXUS on the license plate is a dead give-away that this is the first luxury car you've ever been able to afford? Are you so excited about your new car that you are willing to advertise to the world that you've just recently traded up from a 15-year-old Chevy?

Well, good for you getting that big new job with the big new paycheck, but this is Michigan, sweetie. As the last one in, you'll be the first one out when they downsize, and you'll be selling that car back to Lexus of Lansing and heading for the used car lot.

I hope driving to job interviews in a 1998 Ford with 1 LEXUS on its license plate will be as embarrassing to you then as your pretension should be now.

A Date By Any Other Name

Today is 10-10-10.

I do pay attention to these things, ever since the spring day when I was in the third grade and my teacher (Wilma W. Watkins, for those of us who love alliteration) pointed out that the date was 5-5-55. For the next 45 years, I paid attention every 11 years (almost) when this phenomenon occurred again. I remember where I was on 6-6-66 when I pointed out the date to someone, and I remember 8-8-88 and 9-9-99, but I seem to have missed 7-7-77. I don’t remember noticing that date, nor did I remark upon it in my journal. I always try to note odd dates in my journal.

Well, anyway, since we hit the new millennium, there have been lots of those amusing dates, because that’s what happens during the first dozen years of a millennium, principally because there are twelve months to match the first twelve years.

So, from 2001 to 2012, starting with 01-01-01, there have been or there will be one of these dates every year until we get to 12-12-12.

Also during the first dozen years of a millennium, we get some other funky dates like counting up (e.g., 02-03-04) and down (09-08-07). Some people got excited counting by twos up (02-04-06) and down (07-05-03) although those did not impress me quite as much.

In the next couple years we will have 12-11-10, 9-10-11, 11-11-11, 10-11-12, and 12-12-12. After that we have to wait until February 2, 2022 and then every 11 years thereafter until a new millennium gives us 12 more years that can be numbered 1 through 12.

Avid reader Kristin Mersberger of Rochester, Minnesota (OK, my niece) pointed out that the Chicago Bears started their second-string quarterback today. He wears number 10 – and they won. Matt Forte had a great game, rushing for two touchdowns. He wears number 22. He must just be ahead of his time.

Land of Lincoln

I'm from Illinois.

I’ve lived in Michigan since 1980. When I travel (literally or virtually) and someone asks me where I'm from, I say Michigan because that's where I live now. But I'm from Illinois.

I never intended to stay in Michigan. I've never really liked it here. Among the things I dislike most are the complete lack of specialty liquor stores, the primitive driver license issuing system, the Eastern time zone, the auto industry, and the habit of local television stations to broadcast sports featuring Lions and Tigers instead of Bears and Cubs.

You would think that after 30 years there would be something about Michigan I find redeeming. Nope. Well, all right -- Michigan does have a cool big bridge and lots of Indian casinos, but that doesn't inspire sweet feelings in me. When I cross the state line back into Michigan after a trip, I tend to notice it. When crossing the state line into Illinois, I still get all warm and fuzzy inside.

So why did I stay in Michigan all these years? Because that's where the love of my life is, who, incidentally, is not from Michigan either. And we both stayed here for our jobs.

On January 31, 2014, I will have lived in Michigan longer than I lived in Illinois.

That is going to mess me up.

All Saints' Day

What are the chances that three people who share a birthday will all work for the same company, work in the same department, work on the same floor, and sit in adjacent cubicles all in a row?

I mean, how freaky is that?

Co-workers with the same birthday, sure. There are five of us (out of about 650 employees) where I work who were born on November 1. Four of us are in the same department. But that three of us who were born on the same date are occupying workstations all in a row is an extremely weird coincidence.

I'm in the middle cube, by the way. On the one side is a woman, the other side is a man. We were born in three different years (1968, 1965, 1946) in different places (Illinois, Michigan, Bangladesh).

And we came together here. My my.

Dad's Two Cents' Worth

After my father died in 1978, we found a small cardboard box in his top bureau drawer that contained about three dozen old or unusual coins. It was not a serious coin collection, and none of the coins was extremely rare or valuable. I'm sure he took most of them out of circulation after getting them in change.

There were, among other things, a few large cents (pre-1856) and quite a few Indian-head pennies and Liberty nickels. There was a half cent and a two-cent piece, some Morgan silver dollars, and some commemorative half dollars. There were a few foreign coins, but most were American.

What is really fascinating about his little accumulation of coins is what it did not contain. For instance, there were no Standing Liberty quarters, no Mercury Dimes, and no buffalo nickels.

Now, coins will generally remain in circulation for at least 20 years after they are last produced, and that should have held true for the Standing Liberty quarter (minted from 1916-1932), Mercury Dime (1916-1945), and buffalo nickel (1913-1938). Yet he didn't put any of those away in his little cardboard box.

Why would that be?

He could simply have lost interest, I suppose, but I think the real reason is that to a man born in 1912, these coins would not seem old or unusual. They were coins he literally grew up with.

You Are What You Do (or They Did, Back When)

Well, this is about as fugitive a thought as I've ever had. How I got here was by watching lots of old episodes of Murder, She Wrote. The main character's name is Jessica Fletcher. A fletcher is a maker of arrows.

There are many surnames derived from occupations: baker, weaver, miller, brewer, farmer, barber, singer, mason. There's wright (worker) and specific wrights: wheel-, cart-, and wainwright (makers of wheels, carts, and wagons); and all those woodworkers: joiner, sawyer, turner, carpenter. Some are more obscure: chandler (retailer), cooper (barrel maker), crocker (potter), draper (dry goods seller), tanner (curer of leather), tucker (cleaner of cloth). I could go on.

But I won't, because here's the point, at last -- I cannot find anybody whose last name is Printer, and I wonder why.

Could it be that printing, as an occupation, is a relative newcomer? Most of the names I've listed here go back 700 or 800 years, many of them much further than that. But we're into the 16th Century before printing becomes a regular job.

Before printing, of course, written material was painstakingly copied by hand by a scrivener (scribe). There are plenty of people named Scrivener.

But nobody named Printer.

Hmm.

And here's a post script. There are a few people whose last name is Cobbler, but lots more people whose name is Shoemaker. Now why is that, do you think?

To read, press on

In his poem "I Am Waiting," Lawrence Ferlinghetti (one of my fave poets, by the way) talks about many things he's waiting for, but since he mentions it several times, we can assume the one main thing he is waiting for is "a rebirth of wonder."

That's lofty stuff. And it should be, being poetic and all. My needs and desires, on the other hand, are pretty simple. Oh, sure, I'm waiting to win the lottery, and I'll even wait around for world peace, the obliteration of hunger, and a cure for cancer. But when it comes right down to the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of every-day life, there really is just one thing I'm waiting for. And it is this:

Someday, somebody is going to invent a cardboard container that says, "To open, press here," and I'm going to press there, and it's going to open.

That will deliver me some wonder.

I Don't Smell Very Good

I enjoy saying that I don't smell good.

What I should say is that I don't smell well. Of course, there are definitely times when I get all hot and sweaty and really stink, but in general it's my sense of smell that stinks.

As far as I can remember, it's always been this way. I remember one Monday morning when I was in high school people were practically vomiting from the stench of something in the home-ec room that had been left out of the refrigerator all weekend. To me it was just a faint odor.

One Christmas -- I was in my mid-thirties by then -- my sister-in-law was saying how nice it was to have a real tree in the house, and I asked her why. She said it was because of the needles, and I said, "Yeah, you have to vacuum them up." She said, "No, for the smell." To which I replied in genuine wonder, "Do pine needles smell?"

Epiphany! That's why my college roommate had brought a small pine bough into our room and propped it in a corner. When asked what she planned to do with it, she had said "Nothing. It's just nice to have." Definitely strange, I had thought, but harmless. And now suddenly after all these years I figured out she had brought it in to perfume our room.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law (looking like she would weep at the sadness of it) said, "You mean you've never smelled a pine tree?"

Nope. Never have. But then, I've never smelled a skunk either.

Bug Your Bundies

I keep saying, often with the slightest hint of wonder, that you can find anything on the internet. And that's a good thing when you want a .wav file of Andy Devine saying "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!" But if you want to validate your own self-perceived uniqueness, forget it.

Lately I've taken to Googling expressions that I have always suspected were unique to me and my friends and my family. What a disappointment.

As an example, when I was in college in the mid-60's in mid-Wisconsin, we moved the interjectory "hey" from the beginning to the end of a sentence: "Hey, wait for me!" became "Wait for me, hey!" Actually, I still do that sometimes. But unique? No. Apparently people in parts of the U.K. do it all the time. Darn.

Another oddball locution from those days was "Bug your bundies." That meant to hurry up. So far I can find no reference to that anywhere, so I get one point.

My grandfather liked to say that supper would consist of "slumgullion and essence of squadrops." I've heard slumgullion used a lot, and there are even recipes for it on line -- sounds kind of like do-it-yourself Hamburger Helper. Google returns nothing for squadrops, however, so Grampie gets half a point.

Imagine my disappointment, however, when I Googled something my mother used to say. When she'd see me exerting myself at some task or other, she'd say "Don't strain your milk!" Since I never heard anybody else ever say that, I assumed it was something of her own. No. The Urban Dictionary is all over it. But what really blew my mind was that I never even got the whole thing typed in the box -- I only got as far as don't stra:

Oh, well. Don't strain your milk. But bug your bundies.

O The Technology of it All!

I went to the library one night this week. I hadn’t been there in a long time.

I won’t discuss using a computer instead of a card catalogue to locate the book I wanted. I got over that some time ago. And I’m used to having the woman at the circulation desk zap the barcode on my library card and the barcode on the book with a hand-held barcode zapper.

It’s what happened next that got me. A little machine belched out a little piece of paper similar to a cash-register receipt, which the woman tucked between the pages of the book before handing it back to me. This receipt shows the name of the library, the title of the book, a bunch of code numbers (including one for me, preserving my privacy), and the date the book is due back.

I never saw this one coming.

I am trying to envision a world in which no library book will ever again feel the impact of a rubber stamp upon that slip of paper glued to its flyleaf that, back in the good old days, showed the due date. What have we come to?

Of course, the receipt can double as a bookmark.

Since I’m on the subject, what about that technology that we did see coming? Not so many decades ago they (you know, they) said that someday there would be a computer that would fit into one room. Now we have computers that fit on your lap.

Also not all that long ago they said that some day you wouldn’t need money, everything would be handled electronically. Well, we’re there. Direct deposit, direct bill payments, PayPal, debit cards. Even McDonald’s takes debit cards now.

And yet…and yet…50 years ago they also told me that by the year 2000 we’d all be flying around the sky with jet packs on our backs.

Still waiting for that one.

Murituri te salutamus

When I was in the second grade, I was officially enrolled at Oak Street School, but I actually attended class in the high school, which was across the street. I was among the first wave of baby-boomers to hit the local school district, and they were scrambling to accommodate us. While a new grammar school was being built, they rented two rooms in the high school.

One day some of us were in the hallway outside our classroom when a group of high school girls came by. They were all dressed in gym suits and walking in single file down the hall from the boys' (new, big) gymnasium to the girls' (old, small) gym. For some reason -- maybe to impress the little kids -- they all put one hand on the shoulder of the girl in front of them as they marched down the hall. The last girl in the line turned to me as she went by and said, "Just wait 'til you're in high school, kid."

"Oh Gosh!" thought I. "High school! I'll never be in high school!"

Well, a mere six years later, I was, in the fall of 1960. My first class at 8:00 a.m. on that first day of my high school career was none other than Latin 1. It was taught by Mrs. Anderson, who I thought was probably old enough to have known Caesar personally. She probably had his sense of humor too.

Some of the first words she spoke that morning included a threat. "Most of you will forget almost everything you ever learn in this class. But I promise you, you will NEVER forget sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt."

And as you see, even 50 years later -- I haven't.

Sploring

Sploring is an activity that has probably been invented and reinvented ever since there have been people with no place to go who wanted to go somewhere. No doubt it was originally conducted on foot. Our version involves an automobile.

It's a simple concept, but there are some rules:

There is no destination. You just pick a direction and drive, taking back roads as much as possible. Dirt roads are optional, depending on how recently you've had your car washed.

You may not consult a map or ask for directions until you are so completely lost you cannot figure out how to get anywhere.

Whenever the opportunity to change direction arises, the occupants of the car may take turns deciding whether to turn right or left or not at all. The driver always has the final say (see rule above about dirt roads).

Advanced Sploring involves wending your way from one small town to another and stopping in each to buy instant lottery tickets at the local mom-and-pop convenience store. Everyone scratches the tickets immediately but they are not redeemed for cash prizes (if any) until you reach the next such store in the next such town. The game ends when somebody loses a bunch of money or when everybody is covered in nubbly little scratch-off crumbs, whichever comes first.

Although optimum conditions for Sploring include sunshine and moderate temperatures, it may be practiced at any time of the year as long as the roads are clear of ice and snow. If Sploring in winter, however, it is important to remember that what looks like a wide shoulder with plenty of room to pull over preparatory to doing a U-ie in the road might actually be a snow-covered ditch, and it will then require a farmer who lives nearby to just happen to be passing by who will be nice enough to go home and get his tractor to pull you out.

If Sploring in certain parts of Michigan, you should also be wary of dirt roads through dense woods where men in para-military outfits carrying assault rifles are playing games. Should you encounter such an area, it is strongly recommended you get the hell out of there as fast as you can.

Popularity (not the song by George M. Cohan)

When I was in high school, there were the popular kids and the not popular kids. I was in the drama club, sang in the choir, and averaged mostly average grades, which pretty much put the kibosh on any pretensions I might have had about being in with the in crowd.

We not popular kids referred to the popular ones as "rah-rahs" -- or just "rahs" for short -- as in rah-rah-sis-boom-bah, because the popular kids as a group comprised the cheerleaders and their football- and basketball-playing boyfriends, the student council, the honor society, and the hall monitors. There was also a small but equally popular coterie of hangers-on.

In general, and with only a very few exceptions, the rah-rahs did not like non-rahs, and vice-versa. The question that occupies me today is, what made us call that clique of students popular in the first place? The popular kids were actually only popular with each other, not with any of the rest of us.

I suspect that having persons from my past pop up on Facebook wanting to be my friend is what propels me into these nostalgic funks.

And here I am, back again

A long time between this blog and the last, but it's easily explained. About ten days of it was our vacation. The rest was recovery.

We were on our way home -- it was our last night on the road, so the vacation was great up until the middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom.

If you ever break your arm in Iowa City, I recommend the University of Iowa Medical Center. They were wonderful.

The long and the short of it

So, OK, I am short. Not tall. Vertically challenged. Height deficient. Growth impaired. Always in the front row in group pictures, never chosen for basketball. My nickname at summer camp was Shorty. My brother called me Runt. I also frequently heard Half-Pint, Shrimp, and Squirt.

You would think I'd be used to this by now. And yet ...

There I am hanging around the house in my weekend stay-home clothes. My visiting sister-in-law (6'0" in her stocking feet) stares at my legs, a puzzled look on her face, and finally says, "How does Little Jan end up with pants that are too short?"

BECAUSE THEY ARE PEDAL PUSHERS, DAMN IT!

On anybody else, they would come a few inches below the knee. On me, they end a couple inches above the ankle.

I am dating myself calling them pedal pushers. They are called capri pants nowadays.

I've been to Capri. I didn't see anybody in short pants there.

Royal connections

I saw that today is the birthday of Queen Victoria. Born in 1819, I think it was.

I am descended from Edward I and so was she, and so is the current queen, of course. Elizabeth II, in fact, is my 22nd cousin. We both have Edward I and Eleanor of Castille as 21st-great-grandparents.

That would make Queen Victoria, who is QEII's great-great-grandmother, something like my 17th cousin removed five times.

Happy birthday, Cuz.

Where are those permanent records?

When I was in grade school, teachers tried to frightened us into submission by telling us that not only our grades but also every misdeed we perpetrated would become part of our permanent school records and that those records would follow us for the rest of our lives. College admissions officers and prospective employers, they said, would be justified in dismissing our applications when they read the awful truth about our behavior in the sixth or seventh grade.

Has anybody ever seen any of those permanent records?

What a crock that was. But we bought it.

Knez is Bohemian

I am Bohemian, not Czechoslovakian.

The Romans gave the name Bohemia to an area in Eastern Europe occupied by a Celtic tribe (the Boii) who were displaced by a race of people called Czechs in the first centuries of the Christian Era in that long sweep of migration and settlement generally referred to as the barbarian invasions.

Bohemia, apparently at times a kingdom and at others a principality, enjoyed a few centuries of independence here and there, but it was mostly in and out of the control of other empires, notably the Moravians, the Holy Roman Empire, and Austria-Hungary.

After the Habsburgs were defeated in World War I, their Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and several new countries created out of it. What had once been Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia were amalgamated into the new nation of Czechoslovakia.

After World War II, Czechoslovakia, along with all the other Eastern European countries, fell under the influence of Communist Russia and remained under their control until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1993, the Czechs and Slovaks agreed to divide the country in two. Slovakia was reestablished, and that part of Czechoslovakia that had been Bohemia and Moravia was renamed the Czech Republic.

There are a number of places in the United States with significant populations of persons of Czech or Bohemian descent. Iowa and Wisconsin both have such enclaves, and so does Chicago. Many of these people refer to themselves as Czech or Czechoslovakian.

Czech can be thought of as an ethnicity and Bohemian as a nationality, so it is not necessarily incorrect to refer to me and my family as Czech. It is very incorrect, however, to call us Czechoslovakian since Czechoslovakia had not even been invented yet when my grandparents immigrated to the United States in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.

My family and their cronies in the Chicago area referred to themselves as Bohemians, called their language Bohemian, and named things for that place – my grandfather's Odd Fellows lodge was called Bohemia Loze (Bohemian Lodge), and he is buried at Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago.

Proud to be Bohemian, I am. I'm not Czechoslovakian.

Name that name

Something came up the other day about dancers, maybe because it was Martha Graham's birthday, and then I thought about Twila Tharp. I remember how odd a name it sounded to me when I first heard it, lo these many years ago. It still is an odd-sounding name.

A long time ago I knew a girl named Ardith Klutz. Not that there's anything wrong with either name -- Ardith Wilson, Sue Klutz, no problem. But the two together takes it to a whole new level of humor.

People who have strange or funny or potentially funny last names should not give their kids first names that compound the problem.

Mary Blundstone, Carol Dingleberry, John Kornbleet are only moderately amusing, but Bertha Blundstone, Daphne Dingleberry, Thaddeus Q. Kornbleet are hilarious.

Those three (latter) are real people, by the bye. All dead now, probably.

It's the whiskey

I happen to own on DVD the entire five years' worth of Upstairs, Downstairs (my all-time favorite television show), which is set in England in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. A few years ago while going through the whole series again, I noticed the characters were drinking sidecars at one point. I looked it up on the Internet and found that the sidecar was a popular drink around the time of World War I. I had to try it.

A basic sidecar is brandy, triple sec and lemon juice. I made one with Courvoissier, Grand Marnier and lemon juice out of a green bottle (or maybe a yellow plastic lemon-shaped squeeze thing). Despite that, I liked it. A lot.

Then I discovered actual real lemons, squeezed by me and used in place of the "Realemon" lemon juice in the green bottle. It opened a whole new world.

I like my cocktail when I get home from work, or before cooking Sunday supper, or any time I feel like I want one. And I probably drink some sort of side car more often than anything else. My current favorite variation is the Irish Whiskey Sidecar, which I believe I invented, thus:

2 oz Jameson (12-yr-old only)
1 oz Cointreau
1 oz fresh lemon juice

I was out of Jameson 12 a few months back (the stuff is $40 a bottle) and tried making it with Jack Daniels. Now I like Jack Daniels, when I'm in the mood for sour mash whiskey, but it never was quite right. I fooled with the proportions -- less lemon, more Cointreau, less Cointreau, more lemon, although rarely less whiskey -- and I fooled with the proportions some more, but it never was quite right.

And then somebody bought me a bottle of Jameson 12 for Christmas, and I discovered the real truth. It's not the proportions. It's the whiskey.

My second favorite variation, and a close second it is:

2 oz Absolut vodka
1/2 oz Cointreau
1/2 oz lemon juice

More Cointreau and/or more lemon overpowers the vodka, that's why the proportions of those items are half what goes in against the Jameson 12. The vodka sidecar took a lot of fooling with the proportions too, but I got it.

Right now, it's a Jameson Sidecar I'm drinking, and I'm loving it. And writing about it.

Too bad somebody isn't here to share it with me. The drink, or the blog. Either one.

If I were actually rich

If I had a crapload of money, I would hire a scullery maid. I love to cook, but I hate cleaning up the kitchen. Yes, we have a dishwasher, and yes, people I know, like my beloved niece, put everything in the dishwasher, but I just can't. I want the expensive knives to last me the rest of my life, so they don't go into the dishwasher. And I worry about tiny plastic stuff. And so I wash plastic and most of the metal, especially cookie sheets and pots and pans, and sometimes the flatware and cocktail shakers and shot glasses and utensils. And so I wish I had a scullery maid who would clean the kitchen and wash the pots and pans and wipe the counters and clean the stove top. And that's what I have to say about that.

Plain Cooking

I started Weight Watchers again this week, partly for myself (reluctantly) and partly to support my partner, who is more ready than I to be committed to it. This is the sixth or seventh or eighth time I'm joined WW. The last time, two or three years ago, I lost 30 pounds, which I have gained back, of course.

We'll see. I don't plan to be a zealot. I'm thinking two days on, one day off, something like that. Today is off. I made us French toast for breakfast, but I cut proportions -- only three slices of center-cut bacon and five halves of bread each, as compared to God-knows how many. A small step, but an important one.

And now while the flounder fillets are thawing out (I hope) in a sink full of cold water in the kitchen, I'm going to go make myself cocktail. A whiskey side car tonight, and a double -- 2 ounces of Jameson 12-year-old Irish whiskey, 1 ounce of Cointreau, and a scant ounce of fresh lemon juice. Yum.

Blog 1 - Is a Title Necessary?

My first random thought concerns the nature of the introductory blog. It is probably important to begin as I mean to go on, but fugitive thoughts being what they are, I don't suppose it matters, especially since readership hereof will likely never grow past single digits -- or for that matter even a singular single digit, that is me -- it really doesn't matter.

Therefore, I would like to say that I heard Mozart's Haffner Symphony, or the last movement of it, the other day while sitting the doctor's waiting room, and I didn't recognize it. I decided it was Mozart and I knew it was a symphony, but I didn't know it as No. 35, and I was a little ashamed of myself. Nice symphony, the Haffner. I recommend it.