...and are psychotics

    There's so little going on in my life that I guess I've blogged about everything that's actually happened and considerable numbers of items that didn't happen but were instead just observations. So when I turned right onto a street and a motorist less than a block away (but more than say 100 feet) objected so vociferously as to pass me, stop, and come back and yell at me, I blogged about that. When stop signs started having "Cross traffic does not stop" signs added to them, I blogged about that. And now the intersection where that particular mental case took issue with my driving has had such a sign added to its stop sign. I think I'll write the city and highway department and suggest that in this case, the sign should read: "Cross traffic does not stop, and are psychotics." No doubt nobody will think it's funny but me, but I really, really do.

Your friend John is an idiot

    I noted recently a couple of near misses when I moved into an already occupied right-hand lane, failing to check my blind spot and thus nearly causing accidents. Yesterday at a red light, I studied my mirrors carefully and realized something that everybody else probably learned in their first few weeks of driving: you don't need to see your own head in your rear-view mirror. When I adjusted the (interior) mirror such that I could no longer see any part of my head, suddenly my blind spot shrank to... nothing, really. Face. Palm. Boy, am I an idiot! Then again, 35 years late is still better late than never, I guess, and I certainly anticipate being a much safer driver from here on. Feeling dumb for a while might teach me a little humility. Even more than 35 years late. Maybe.

Didn't expect to miss the goats

    The goats next door have been gone for at least four days now. They were very cute but very needy, or at least very, very vocal. As such, you would think that I would be glad that they are gone, but it makes me sad. If I could somehow convince myself that they had gone away to frolic and gambol on a farm somewhere for the rest of their lives, it would be different but somehow I cannot convince myself of it. The fact that the guy living in the house on the property where they were living had told us at the outset that they wouldn't be there long seemed ominous at the time. I suspect that they wound up on somebody's Memorial Day cookout menu. I'm not all that much more likely to go vegetarian or anything, but I'm certainly a lot less likely to order cabrito any time soon. And I've got to say that it seems less and less like a good idea to eat anybody that can talk, even if you can't understand what they're saying.

Italics

    I'm trying to figure out how to write around italics under circumstances (Facebook especially) where they aren't available. ALL-CAPS are obnoxious at best, but convey emphasis better than any other option I can think of. I know perfectly well that folks use underscores _before_ and _after_ the word to be stressed, but that goes back to the days when nearly all Internet interaction was text only with boldface and italics a distant dream. I'm not sure anyone even remembers that usage these days.
    What I've been trying to do is rearrange my sentences so that the stresses will fall such that the word I want especially emphasized will naturally receive its due stress. It's really tough, maybe impossible, and probably above my pay grade. I don't think I'll _ever_ get it right! But it's fun to try. Also, I finally learned that you don't capitalize the I in "italics." I mean the FIRST one. At least not with regard to the typeface.

Ow!

    Don't read this one! Go away! You don't want to see this, believe me! Oh, you're female? Well maybe you'll get a kick out of it.
    Yesterday, I was driving along the road, minding my own business, when I noticed that the Hummer H3 ahead of me had a most arresting image covering the rear windshield. There was a hockey stick at the top and one at the bottom; in between read in huge letters: COCK HOCKEY. All I could think was Ouch, and driving got a lot more difficult when my knees involuntarily clapped together.
    The sticks looked like field hockey sticks rather than ice hockey ones, so I thought that USC had a field hockey team and that they were uncommonly hard-nosed. (Shoulda known though that not many women voluntarily drive a vehicle called a Hummer, I guess.) Googling "Cock Hockey," which I do not recommend (although if you do it now, you'll see this blog entry; Mom would have been so proud) eventually revealed that what Downtown U. has is a men's ice hockey team, and this is their proud slogan. I swear I am not making this up, no matter how much I might wish I were. Ow!

Navy green

    Hey, it's my birthday; I'm definitely entitled to mail one in. Yesterday, I was putting together a virtual jigsaw puzzle, or virtually putting together a jigsaw puzzle, or how ever you want to put it, and was having difficulty finding dark green pieces to fit with the one I already had. Except that my brain kept supplying me with the phrase "navy green" instead of, say, "forest green." And I'd correct myself and then the next time I looked for dark green my brain tossed up "navy green" again. And again and again. I was fairly tired; maybe that's all it was. But it seems improbable that at just almost 51 years of age, I would have come up with this for the first time. It seems equally unlikely or at least odd that I would have been calling dark green navy green all these years without anyone, least of all myself, noticing. To be honest, I like it a lot as a phrase and would happily use it publicly all the time except that I would most likely confuse people. Of course Army green would work, but my brain declines to identify with anything making that much sense.

Teddy Pendergrass

    Let's stick with music, since I don't want to talk about my birthday. I just wonder why nobody ever plays Teddy Pendergrass records anymore, either solo or with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. The oldies stations are all over Barry White, to such an extent I often feel like it's 1975 again. On the one hand, Barry's sound is a lot more mellow than Teddy's. And I guess they might think that people don't want to be reminded of paralysis and car accidents. Though there are plenty of people with sadder endings whose records still get played.
    The broader question is why aren't there classic soul stations? Where I live, people listen to something they call beach music. Originally, this was '60s R&B, especially Motown, the music that was played at the beach, primarily Myrtle Beach. Eventually it became an industry, and imitation '60s R&B was all over the radio. The local oldies station with the love affair with Barry White also plays tons of beach music; their non-oldies offerings are almost all country. (It's a pretty odd station.)
    I just think that a station playing only genuine R&B and soul from the '60s and '70s would do great. For one thing, black people had a postwar baby boom, too; there would be an excellent base. But more to the point, a vast array of black music from that time crossed over; hell, that's where this beach music stuff came from in the first place. And maybe I could hear me some Teddy Pendergrass!

Short-sighted

    It's Bob Dylan's birthday. I really would have liked to post something pretty by him, "Shelter from the Storm," say, on Facebook as a tribute. However, Sony, which bought Columbia Records ages ago, is hostile to YouTube transmission of their records and gets videos (usually a still of the album cover over the record playing) taken down as soon as they go up. There are official Dylan videos of course; the one for "Shelter from the Storm" is a noticeably Eric Weissberg-free live version. The problem with live Dylan is that we're here for the lyrics; if Dylan ever enunciates, it's in the studio.
    Of course, this could all be Mr. Zimmerman's decision rather than Sony's, but the same story applies to Bruce Springsteen. While Bruce, unlike Bob, is legendary for his live shows, still the same problem with lyrics and enunciation applies. So we've got two old guys, neither of whom has a very pleasant singing voice, both famous for their song lyrics which YouTubians aren't going to be able to decipher. There are 20 years worth of kids who have grown up with the Internet numbering in the millions, and these are the primary music buyers in the land. It seems like Sony (or Bob and Bruce, if you prefer) would figure out that giving access to some of the songs that made them legends would be a good business practice, leading to much improved sales. If I were 30 years younger and somebody had told me "You've got to hear 'Shelter from the Storm' by Bob Dylan!," that video would just make me say, "Why?"
    That said, I was able to find a video for "Idiot Wind" on Vimeo. Don't tell Sony.

Long cool woman, black dress

    Ever since it came out, I've crazy mad loved the Hollies' number "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress." It seldom makes the cut for classic rock radio playlists, but oldies stations will play it occasionally. I listen to sports radio programming at home, but I only listen to music radio in the car because I can't get in any of the stations at home. This isn't a problem with most songs, but what I love particularly about this Hollies song is the intro, and what I love most about the intro are the explosive drums.
    Unfortunately, I often try to play along. In the car. While driving. Once, my drumbeats hit the gearshift and I went into neutral for a moment. This taught me a valuable lesson, but beating on the steering wheel was not a big improvement as regards road safety for myself and others.
    The other day, I had a brilliant insight when the song came on the radio: I leaned forward very slightly and beat hell out of the dashboard instead. Got a lot of satisfaction out of it as well as much better sound, and endangered no lives. Now if only I could train myself not to sing along to "Zombie" by The Cranberries so hard I almost black out...

Skin cancer surgery

    Dad had his skin cancer procedure today. To cut to the chase, it went well, they got everything, and he's no worse for wear. It was a bit of an adventure (well, "ordeal" would be too strong) because they had many surgical patients but only one pathologist. And she or he had to check everybody's tissue samples to say yea or nay as to whether all the cancer had been removed. Also they required us to come a half hour early for his 9:30 appointment. So we had to wait half an hour to start, then they took him back and did the procedure. They put him in a waiting area in back (this one had coffee and sodas and whatnot) and called me back there, too. There we had to wait for about a half hour again, at the end of which they called us into a surgical room and said that they hadn't got it all and they would have to go in again.
    I stayed with him this time. It was not exactly M*A*S*H* level gruesome, though if you're ever given the opportunity to be in a room where wounds are being cauterized, decline. (It didn't smell like burning flesh at least but like burning hair. So only SORT of horrifying.) The surgeon was a cut-up (not a pun), a fellow from Vietnam with a dark sense of humor, so he and I got along. Apparently he had pyloric stenosis as a baby, too, so we shared projectile vomiting stories, to the horror of the nurse. The procedure took maybe five minutes. Then we had to wait on the pathologist again. They let us stay in the same room, though. Maybe 25 minutes later, the doctor and the nurse came back with the happy news that Dad is clear and that we could be on our way. And so we were. He has to come back in a month for a check-up, but that should be a formality. So yaaaaaaaaay!

Music snob finger

    Radio around here isn't really as bad as I sometimes make out, but I have noticed something a little odd about my relationship with the car radio. Whenever a new song comes on, I change the channel reflexively. Often as not, I realize a moment later, "Hey, that's one of my favorite songs!" and change it back immediately. The problem I think is that almost all contemporary music is too autotuned for me to be able to tolerate and the oldies stations have such a tight rotation that at any moment I'm tired of half the songs they play. Or maybe I'm not a very trusting person. But hell, I was tired of most of those tunes already back in the '70s and '80s. Fond of Boston as I am, I just don't need to hear the same three or four songs over and over. (Well, maybe "More Than A Feeling.")
    I can't decide whether I want to reform this tendency or not. Worthwhile as it may be to protect my ears from one more listening to "Hotel California" or "Sultans of Swing," I kind of feel like an idiot being prey to such a kneejerk reaction. And as I say, the new song is often one that I like. On the other hand, I think it's funny. We'll just see.
    I saw an army truck with a sign on the front reading, "Convoy Follows," but none was apparent. "Does not!," I hollered (with the windows closed, of course).

Yellow tape

    Within easy walking distance of my house is Olympia Park, a little island of green with a large creek flowing through it. There used to be a smaller creek flowing into it, but this was shunted into a culvert so it could be covered up to install a new play area. This was one of those "it's the thought that counts" type moves, because almost nobody ever uses the play area, there not being hellacious numbers of kids in the neighborhood anymore.
    For the past several weeks, the play area has been cordoned off with yellow "Caution Do not enter" tape, which of course is way better than "Crime Scene Do not cross" tape, but still. For a short stretch out of that period, a crew from the county was busily digging in the wood chips underneath the play equipment, but they didn't seem to be comprehensively removing it. I had a wild guess that perhaps fire ants had moved in, but didn't have the sense to ask anyone.
    Today, the yellow tape is gone and in place of the wood chips is something that looks like gravel. It's soft though, so it may be an improvement. There was a certain smell of rubber, though, suggesting that this might be ripped up tires or recycled soda bottles or something such. The play area is ostensibly for kids 5-12 (in other words, old enough not to put random stuff in their mouths) but the few kids that I have seen playing there have been (closely supervised, thank goodness) toddlers. So I'm not sure that plastic-smelling stuff is an improvement. Still, it's nice to see the play area open and whatever the stuff is I think it would be friendly to little feet. If it's also unfriendly to fire ants, that would probably be a plus.

Now they're tearin' down my Burger King!

    First they closed my childhood Kmart and now they're tearing down my neighborhood Burger King. My childhood neighborhood Burger King. My later-childhood neighborhood Burger King. (There was an A&W Root Beer at more or less this location during my early childhood.) Truth to tell, I was much more a Dairy Queen kind of boy, and didn't get into Burger King until my college years. And this Burger King has been out of business for at least a year or two. The outfit that owns the Burger King franchise in this area is mostly in the gas and convenience store business and this location, though right next to a gas/convenience store, is free-standing. It may be that they're going to expand the place next door and put in a Burger King, or it may be that they're just giving up on the neighborhood. Being gluten-free boy, I'm hardly likely to take up eating there again, so it's not like it affects me personally. I guess it's just a drag seeing something else from my childhood dry up and blow away. Unless of course they put in a new A&W Root Beer of course.

Alleged peach cobbler

    As I've mentioned, I accidentally discovered Bisquick gluten-free baking mix (through Aldi temporarily offering a fake version). I tried it as a pizza crust but found it to be a little sweet and thought that it might make a nice GF peach cobbler. I tried twice to make peach cobbler muffins. The first time wasn't good enough to share, but once I actually added some sweetener they were OK. Still, I thought I could do better and had the brilliant idea to look up Bisquick peach cobbler recipes. And there's an official one and everything. They included milk and butter and sugar, so a lot of substitions were in order to bring it in line with my particular sensitivities (and/or insanities). I also finally looked up how you're supposed to change recipes to allow substituting honey for sugar. Whoops! Probably should have done that some years ago!
    Anyway, it turned out like this: Preheat oven to 350. Toss in mixing bowl 1C of Bisquick GF baking mix, 1/2 cup of safflower oil, 2/3 cup or so of honey, 3/4 cup or so (I'm so dang precise, aren't I?) of almond milk, and and and, that's it, really. Bisquick wanted me to add 1/2 tsp of nutmeg but I don't have any. I do have that dang Ceylon cinnamon and meant to put 1/2 tsp of that in instead but I forgot. So I sprinkled a bit on at the end. It didn't affect the taste enough for me to notice.
    Drain your canned peaches. Bisquick said to use a 29 oz can, but those only come in heavy syrup. For all that you're draining it, I felt that I'd wind up with too much syrup (hell, I even rinsed to drain 'em further, but still). I got two 15 oz cans of sliced peaches in 100% fruit (specifically pear) juice.
    Mix up your dough, pour in a pan. (Bisquick wanted an 8x8 baking dish, whatever that may be. I used a 7x11 pan and it filled nicely. That 8x8 dish might have overfilled pretty markedly.) Add your peaches. Throw in the oven for an hour. POW!
    I thought it turned out pretty nicely. I mean, everything tastes good warm out of the oven. This actually tasted better cold the next morning, because the honey flavor came out better. Of course, this means you have to use good, local honey. It costs more but it's so worth it. Now to make more alleged peach cobbler muffins!

Accidental sworn enemy

    I'm not having a good brain function day. Partly this might be because I went hiking for an hour or more at Congaree National Park and forgot to bring any water. Regardless, on my way home, I was turning onto I-77 South from Garners Ferry Road (a left turn against four lanes of traffic). Spacing out completely, I didn't realize that I was cutting off an oncoming minivan trying to turn onto the same ramp. (I thought they would have a separate lane and a Yield sign, but they didn't.) Later at the Shop Road exit, I moved out of the right lane (with the minivan still behind me) to give merging traffic from Shop Road an easier time. But my exit, Bluff Road, was the next one and so I moved to get back in the right lane. COMPLETELY forgetting the minivan (and failing to turn my head to check my blind spot) and nearly colliding with them. Oddly, they didn't even hit the horn. My reflexes and theirs were pretty good, or good enough at least, and no collision happened. It definitely served as a reminder to check the dang blind spot. Anyway, if you're out there minivan driver, I'm very, very sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again. Please don't declare vendetta.

Duckweed trail

    My favorite-- oh wait. Didn't want to leave anyone who read yesterday's blog post in suspense. Chicken noodle split pea vegetable soup turned out pretty good, or well. Apparently, 17 year old me misinformed 51 year old me about whether or not I like split peas. While it's true that they have a certain grittiness that is something less than ideal, other than that they're really quite superb. So at the age of way too many years old, I've become a split pea fan. Yay!
    Now then, my favorite local trail is at Congaree Creek Heritage Preserve. We have been suffering from a week and more of flooding, though it's the best kind: no casualties and practically no property damage. However, if you like hiking near creeks and rivers (as I do), you've been SOL for a while. Things are returning to normal slowly. Congaree Creek, though, has the gates to its parking area locked, which should have been a tip-off. Things weren't too bad on the trail at first. Having visited briefly a couple of days ago, I knew it was pretty muddy so I took my walking stick, but I didn't have much in the way of trouble. I got to see a barred owl, I think, and some manner of wooly caterpillar, so that was cool.
    I got to the place where I usually see the alligator, but he was either hiding, gone, or stuck up a tree. At this point, I was still less than half way around the loop trail and I hadn't hit any major problems. Common sense would have said that they wouldn't have the gate closed if there wasn't some kind of damage somewhere on the trail and thus I ought to turn around. I am not the King of Common Sense, unfortunately. I carried on.
    The damage turned out to be not all that dramatic. One short wooden bridge had been borne up by the flood and set back down again at a pretty awesome angle. My end was maybe three feet in the air. But I was able to climb up and it didn't teeter-totter or anything, so that was kind of fun. Probably not recommended for the general public, however. The rest of the trail featured something I don't think I've seen before. The flood had raised the ponds so high that the trail was carpeted in many places with duckweed. It looked like moss, but moss doesn't grow that fast. It was pretty cool really. Probably tough on the ducks, though.

The terror that is... split peas!

    Some months ago Aldi had split peas for sale as one of their items available for a limited time only. Having heard that they are good for you, I figured "what the hey" and bought a bag. However, on the few occasions I have had split pea soup, I was less than enthralled. And I don't know what else one can do with split peas. So the bag sits and sits. Today I'm tired of kowtowing to splitpeaophobia, so I'm going to do something with the dang things. I think it'll be split pea chicken noodle vegetable soup. One expects that sauteed Vidalia onion and minced garlic will make an appearance since they always do. One good thing: very hard to die of split pea soup. (Only worry is an "Exorcist" scene.) So the worst case scenario is a few meals a little short of excellence; I can live with this.
    Apparently I achieved excellence yesterday, as my peach cobbler muffins were totally gobbled up by the Drinking Liberally crowd. I mean to the point that I never even got one! (I did get to eat the pancake I made from the leftover batter and some peach chunks; it was good.) I'll post the recipe once I actually get to taste it.

Stringy

    The poor Monkey. Amelia the cat, aka The Monkey (or this week, YippieYippieYippieYippie for some reason my brain has yet to explain to me) has to put up with a very slow-witted roommate. It took me years to figure out that she might like playing with string. I think that this is because when Alice and I used to try to play with Alice's older (now late and lamented) cat Madeline with string she showed little interest unless we swung a yoyo towards her so that she could bat it away. So maybe we decided that the legend about cats playing with string was unfounded. Or maybe I'm dumb as a brick.
    I did however eventually figure out that Amelia dug string if only after 6 years or so. But what I thought was that she liked string-like or stringy things, so a bootlace or yarn would be just as good. And often she will play with a bootlace with a fair degree of abandon. In the hot months, I prefer the bootlace because it's brown and ought to show up better against the white bedspread than the white string does. But no!
    Yesterday, Amelia was nagging me to be played with, and I kept getting out the bootlace and she kept ignoring it. So finally I got out the string (which is better hidden, since she could actually eat it and die). Instant rekittenization! She was enthralled. So maybe she got bored with the bootlace, or maybe she's scared of the aglets, or maybe she wants to show off that her eyesight is better than I thought. Regardless, I've learned that stringy isn't good enough; sometimes there's no substitute for string!

We've got tonight

    I'm sure that I've mentioned my unhealthy fixation on Casey Kasem's American Top 40 reruns from the '70s and '80s. The broadcast from the weekend before last (that is, the '80s one) featured a lulu: a duet between Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton remaking Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight." I somehow missed this one the first time, but it was quite a thing to hear. It was perhaps the best singing performance either of them ever had. But (Who didn't see that coming?) unsurprisingly, it was criminally overproduced, pretty much wrecking all they had brought to the table. And at the end, they did a harmony vocal, changing the final lyric from "Why don't you stay?" to "Why don't we stay?" all but demolishing any emotional impact Seger's song had.
    But that's not why I'm talking about it. I thought it would be really great to have it be a duet between two New Yorkers, Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand, say, and instead have them do "Why don't YOU stay?" "No, why don't YOU stay?" "I'm not gonna stay! You stay!" I can just hear Barbra: "My big comeback single is turning into a Neil Simon play!"
    Of course, this works equally well with their actual duet: "YOU don't bring me flowers." "No, YOU don't bring me flowers!" If I'm ripping off an old SNL skit (which is possible since the show's been on since 1975 and the song came out in '78), just don't tell me.

Tunnel vision

    So I was going to Charleston to lay flowers on my mom's grave. Options for flower buying around 9 on a Sunday morning being kind of limited, I set off for Publix as I needed small grocery particles here and there anyway. I zipped straight in and got the groceries I wanted and headed for the little floral area in the back. I was somewhat surprised and disappointed by the limited offerings on Mother's Day, but found a small potted plant with yellow flowers, the color I wanted (at least if I couldn't find any lilies, which I couldn't, or freesia, which I wouldn't expect to find at Publix).
    Going to pay, I noticed what I hadn't on the way in; there was a large display of very pretty flowers which I should have seen coming in. They were mostly hydrangea and mostly purple; I liked them a lot, but still wanted yellow, so I stuck with the rather Charlie Brown plant I had already selected. It was small but it was lovely; I think she would have liked it. It's just odd that my tunnel vision is so severe that I didn't notice an entire display of Mother's Day flowers, but then, how awake is anybody at 9 on a Sunday morning?

Ocho cuarenta

    As old people go, I'm not as set in my ways as some are. But every time I try to listen to contemporary music, I find myself under assault by Auto-Tune, which just about causes me physical pain and makes my hair stand on end even more than usual. The really odd thing is that most of the singers being autotuned obviously don't need it; they're clearly very competent singers who would benefit from firing their producers and just singing.
    Anyway, I wind up mostly listening to oldies stations for this reason. However, if I could, I would listen almost all the time to La Raza, Ocho Cuarenta, the excellent local Spanish language station at 840 on the AM dial. Unfortunately, like many smaller stations, their signal shuts off every day at sundown. (I'm a little unclear on the whys and wherefores of this, too. A station from Louisville comes in pretty clearly after sundown, but it seems pretty improbably that they would actually pay to get the 840 AM band in Columbia SC after dark; seems more likely a coincidence.)
    But the more confusing part is that their signal comes and goes during the day. Sometimes it's all but inaudible; sometimes it's nothing but static; other times it's strong. Granted I'm in a car and driving around, but I don't really go all that far most of the time. And granted that AM signals seem to get a lot more interference from overhead power lines. But the other AM stations don't have all these problems.
    So color me bewildered. It's a terrific station when they're playing music and I can hear it. But most of the time, I have to stick with the oldies. At least until somebody gives me some Mexican CD buying tips.
    PS: Oh: http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/why-am-radio-stations-must-reduce-power-change-operations-or-cease-broadcasting-night

Colleton County High School

    I can't decide if this is funny, tragic, weird, or perfectly normal. On Huger St. in Columbia, I was behind two activity buses from Colleton County High School in Walterboro down in the Lowcountry a hundred miles or more from here. Behind them was a car from the Colleton County sheriff's department. As all three turned into the McDonald's together, there's no question that it was not mere coincidence that the deputy was riding behind the buses.
    It sounds like an old Gabe Kaplan routine: my school was so tough they sent sheriff's deputies along on our field trips. Of course, you could think of it as the school asking him to ride along to protect the kids in the big city. Or maybe he's the school's resource officer and he comes along on all field trips. I don't get why he would need to be in a separate car, though I guess you could think of it as analagous with the vehicles that ride ahead of or behind Wide Load trucks. Sort of.
    It just isn't a world I'm familiar with. Back in the day, the buses were driven by other students or recent grads. There was an assistant principal with the job and usually the title of disciplinarian, but there weren't any police officers in the schools. Of course we didn't cause much trouble tired out as we were from walking ten miles to school through the snow uphill both ways. (Guess I screwed that one up by mentioning the bus drivers; oh well.)
    Looking up CCHS online to see if there was a hint what field trip this might be, I found instead that the students are required to wear school uniforms. This, too, is a world we thought we had left behind. Perhaps that's what the deputy was there for: keeping an eagle eye out for uniform violations! Very little would surprise me at this point.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K

    This time in a good way, however. There's a Circle K in Forest Acres (Columbia's answer to Brookline) which had (or at least reflects) a great idea: the gas price sign changes from credit to cash! Everyone has been to gas stations where a relatively low price is shown very clearly on the big sign out front, and it's only when you get up close (or up to a pump) that you find that this is the cash price. The credit card price is five or ten cents higher. (There is one station in the area where they obviously received some complaints, because by the prices for each of the 3 grades of gas it says "CASH" in increasingly large letters.) But I think Circle K, or possibly just this location, is reallly onto something. It's so simple; instead of an old fashioned fixed price sign, you get one that electronically displays one after the other both the cash price and the credit price. (Of course they could go really crazy and just display both, but that would require writing each in half the space, which probably wouldn't really work out.) So yay to Circle K!

Ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Plugcheck!

    As I mention more or less daily, I'm a big fan of old-time radio. One of my favorites was a show called Suspense. It was a brilliant show, but with the onset of television, radio economics got more than a little screwy. Thus, Suspense had a lot of sponsors, one after the other. This doesn't mean what it would to those of us from the TV generations. In those days, each show had one sponsor. So Suspense had one sponsor for one season, then another for the next, etc.
    Towards the end of the years covered by my collection (up to the early '50s), that sponsor was an auto parts outfit called Autolite. Apparently, they're still around. Advertisers from today could take lessons from Autolite. It isn't that their ads were conspicuously good; mostly they weren't. But they were cheerful, positive, and here's the big one: they were different every week! Wouldn't we all hate advertising a little less if it weren't for the constant, unending repetition? Or is that just me?
    So listening to Suspense when I started this obsession a few years ago, I was delighted to encounter a character called Johnny Plugcheck. He had a ridiculously high falsetto and his only role in life was to remind people to check their plugs. When I tried to track the little fellow down, I was surprised to learn what I conveyed in the last paragraph, that every Autolite ad was different and that in fact Johnny P only made one appearance. (I was equally surprised that in spite of this, Google was able to track down the actor playing him; it was the same guy who did Gumby!) The episode featuring Johnny is actually on YouTube, but wouldn't you just know it? This one time when I didn't want them to cut the ads out, they did. Ah well; sic transit gloria mundi, even for an imaginary character who reminds you to check your spark plugs.

Living with wolves family brunch

    This isn't any kind of blog entry, but the alternative would be making fun of the Field Museum on Facebook, and I have great admiration for them and wouldn't want to do that. It isn't like untold numbers of people would see what I posted on FB, but the probability is that less still will see this, and most of them will be friends of mine who can tell that I'm just kidding.
    The subject line above is the name of an event (or at least the name of the Facebook event) which the Field Museum posted yesterday. (Why am I following a museum that's located in Chicago? It's a really good museum and I really dig natural history!) I was boundlessly amused by it and wanted to share it to my FB wall, but as I say thought that this might be a little mean.
    Reminds me of the old vampire joke about "having you for dinner." Or somewhat similarly, a local Pizza Hut had on its marquee sign for a little while:

$19.99 Family Feast
Now Hiring

    I almost went in for an application.

Edit: That's
$19.99 Family Feeding Frenzy
Now Hiring

See? Much scarier!

Dreaming is free

    I switched my overnight old-time radio (sleep-)listening show from Suspense to Escape last night, so dreams about crime solving were in abeyance. Instead I got incredibly vivid dreams having as far as I could tell no connection to the radio shows that were playing, with one possible exception. Weird weird weird, too.
    The first dream featured a child with a small dog and a cat, which doesn't sound too weird, does it? The dream was a bit radio-like in the sense that this colossal back story was being presented to me. Apparently the kid was feral. As a baby, s/he (started out in the dream as a boy, later was a girl) captured and trained a puppy. Later she caught and trained a kitten, too. Somehow s/he fed all of them. And somewhere along the line, a family took her in and taught her how to talk. At the time of my dream, the girl was 10; apparently even in my sleep I can figure that dogs don't live all that long.
    There didn't seem to be any upshot to it all. I guess all this was inspired by a story about monkeys capturing puppies to help guard the troupe. That or last night's pad thai.
    The dream was so weird it shook me a little. It was ages before I fell asleep again. When I did I dreamed that my folks were visiting me in my new home, which had a really large kitchen/dining area. Really large. Really REALLY large. My dad was saying grace, which sounded like words that were actually coming from whatever Escape episode was playing (as my dad is not a big sayer of grace) and I realized that they didn't in fact have any food. I did have some beef stew in the refrigerator, so I ran to get it. The fridge proved to be at least a football field's length away. Townspeople were walking by as I ran to it, and I remarked, "I've GOT to get a smaller kitchen!" I woke up very, very amused.

Yum!

    Finally! A stupid advertising thing that doesn't make me annoyed, just bewildered. At yesterday's Kentucky Derby, prime sponsorship seems to have been purchased by Yum! Brands. This is the outfit comprised of KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and some wings brand I've never heard of. In other words, it's the spunoff fast food operations of Pepsico from five or ten years ago.
    Long ago, KFC was called Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I really think it's been decades. As such, sponsoring the prime sporting event (perhaps) in the state of Kentucky to trumpet the fact that your corporation has turned its back on using the word "Kentucky" might not be one of the top common-sense moves of all time. Or, I dunno, maybe the people of Kentucky are crazy-mad proud that they're so great that KFC can leave the name of the state unsaid.
    Or maybe I think too much. Regardless, I was delighted to see the horses' grooms wearing aprons reading "Yum!" I have a guess that the grooms were somewhat less delighted about this.

Solving crimes

    I've mentioned that I have returned to listening to old-time radio as I sleep, and that this seems to lead to concentrated dreams. Or anyway, I tend to wake anywhere between 4 and 6 in the morning feeling as rested as if I had had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. The weird thing, though, is that I seem to be solving crimes in most of the dreams. The show I listen to most is "Suspense" which indeed features a fair amount of crime solving. I guess I could revert to listening to Spike Jones and see if I start dreaming of blowing on ironmongery!
    More seriously, if anybody out there is still reading this who doesn't see my stuff on Facebook, Dad had some growths on his face biopsied the other week. One was benign, one was pre-cancerous, and two were cancer. So he's looking at some surgery pretty soon. He's expecting it to be minor, outpatient, and under local anesthesia. Hoping he's right on all counts. Good wishes from all quarters are certainly welcome.

Mystery bug mystery SOLVED!

    This is a reference to an earlier post, probably at least a year earlier. If you have a burning need to see it, you could google the name of the blog along with "mystery bug," but as I recall I pretty much phoned that one in so you needn't bother. Especially as I'm phoning in this one, too, so I'll probably just say it all again anyway. SO! Long time ago, I was walking on the boardwalk at Congaree National Park when I had a mysterious visitation. It was an insect that hovered like a helicopter. This of course is not unusual. However, this insect also seemed to resemble a helicopter. I was pretty flummoxed, being pretty sure that no such insect exists. Also, I've never used recreational pharmaceuticals, so I didn't even have a good excuse for hallucinating.
    Today at Congaree Creek, I had another such visitation, and a better look. It was a particularly sneaky dragonfly. This one had half-diaphanous wings, but the diaphanous halves were the inner ones. Toward the outside, the wings appeared to be brown. For somebody with vision as poor as mine, they also seemed somewhat unrelated to the rest of the insect. Certainly not anything like rotors, but you see something hovering and you see part of the wings some distance from the body, and your mind is likely to put two and two together and get succotash. Anyway, mine does. You mean other people's don't?
    I'm sure it's a perfectly ordinary dragonfly, though googling won't produce any answering this description. Of course, that's mostly because I don't know the correct terms. Also, googling "half-diaphanous" gets you a lot of interesting pictures, but very few of them are dragonflies!

Dessert plotting

    This is an extension of the baking mix post from the other day. As pizza crust, (Aldi's imitation of) Bisquick gluten-free baking mix was VERY interesting. In some ways, it was very interesting in the good way. Mostly, though, it was pretty odd.
    For one thing, following the directions yields a dough that was a lot more like pudding than any pizza dough I've ever encountered. It probably would have been very entertaining to throw it in the air like they do in the fancy places, but since I would also be the one cleaning it up, the entertainment value probably wouldn't have lasted too long.
    However, this wouldn't be a problem if it made brilliant pizza dough. And I don't know that it didn't; maybe it just takes a period of adjustment. The main thing is that it seemed very sweet, especially considering that it didn't contain loads of sugar. It does contain more than Bob's Red Mill (gluten free) and Martha White (non GF), but not tons more.
    Still, the flavor is more like sweet southern cornbread, even though the only corn ingredient is corn starch, and not much of that either. Go figure, huh? Regardless, the net result is more like a pancake as pizza dough instead of being biscuitish like the name would suggest. This of course was what I was wishing for; this teaches us perhaps to be careful what we wish for. Still, I think this could be all kinds of crazy-mad fun. I just can't figure out what kind of dessert pizza to make with it. Peach cobbler, a GF version of which I've wanted for years, kinda leaps to mind. Next problem: who do I get to eat it for me?:)

Tipping

    Because of my highly restricted diet, I can hardly eat in restaurants. I'm also the host of the local Drinking Liberally chapter. Since the places that I can eat don't have very good bar offerings, I choose DL venues where I mostly can't eat anything. Instead I mainly just sit there and drink water, but tip $3 so the waitstaff won't resent me too much. Our current location does have one thing that I can eat (steak) but it's quite expensive at least by my standards. Last week I ordered it, happily paid my $20 and tipped. It was only later that I realized the I had tipped the same $3 that I usually tip on nothing. Next time, I'll try to remember to amp the tipping up more than a bit.
    Last night's meeting also coincided with the only cloud-free hours of the week. If I'd known that at the time, I would have sent everybody home to play outside. Clearly, I wouldn't function too well in San Francisco or Seattle. We did wind up standing around in the parking lot for an additional 15 minutes or so; it was crazy-mad lovely.