According to the label on the can, it
contains product from [in alphabetical order] Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, U.S.A, Vietnam
It’s high in iron, vitamin E, niacin, magnesium, zinc, copper, and manganese; also in dietary fiber and saturated fat, but with no cholesterol. It has no salt, very low sugars, and a fair amount of (plant-based) protein. It’s crunchy.
What is it?
From Bob Eckstein’s The Bob substack on 1/7/23, this delightful troupe of dancing Santas, created for the monthly comedy newspaper the Funny Times to sell on t-shirts (this year’s offer came to me by e-mail yesterday:
(bob’s text) Funny Times is getting into the Holiday groove with my Dancing Santas. The perfect Secret Santa gift can be found here.
A Pickleball Christmas: just one of the dozens of made-for-tv movies in the crop for this Christmas. I was dumbfounded when an ad for it came up repeatedly on the Lifetime network. What next?, I wondered, will there be A Grand Theft Auto Christmas, with prostitutes in place of Christmas elves? A Lego Christmas? A Stud Poker Christmas? A Stud Hustler Christmas? (gay porn flicks exist with this theme, but not, I think, with this title). Great filmic visas open up.
So: some details on A Pickleball Christmas. And then a few more notable titles from this years crop. And some reflections on Christmas movies
(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):
A short video that came by me this morning, with some guy’s idea (off the top of his head) of the top five things that men actually want for Christmas; you really don’t want to see the original source. The larger point is that such a list is a distillation of someone’s beliefs about what men are really like — or, more accurately, what real men, normative men, are like.
I would prefer to think of it as a list of things men might not have thought of themselves. So: not want they really want, but what they might like yet might not know about or have thought of getting for themselves. That makes more sense. Ranking the items makes no sense at all.
I am, of course, far off normative American masculinity, so recommendations for such a person pretty much just slide off me, as they do in the annual lists for Fathers Day.
… And glory shone all around
So I sang this afternoon, immersed in the joy of the Christmas season, weeping with pleasure at being able to sing again (and exercise my lungs; my singing is supposed to be both pleasurable and therapeutic), after many weeks of being laid low. And so I write about the hymn tune Sherburne paired with the text of the Christmas carol “While shepherds watched their flocks”, from which comes the angel descending in a shimmer of glory.
Not what I intended to post about today — but the Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio comic routine has turned out to be vastly more complex than I originally thought, so I’m going for the fire-bright Christmas angel. Stay tuned for something later about three people in gorilla suits.
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for the outgoing month of November; and 🎄 for the first Sunday in Advent, so the beginning of the religious Christmas season — focused on the Christ child — that ends on Epiphany, January 6th; and 🏴 St. Andrew’s Day, 11/30, the national day of Scotland, so break out the thistles; meanwhile, 🦃 the follow-up to (US) Thanksgiving continues, on what I like to think of as Black Sunday (in the Long Black Weekend: “She walks these days in a long black veil”)
At my house, the adventures in leftover Thanksgiving food — originally, soy sauce and black vinegar roasted chicken (10-12 pieces, mostly thigh meat) on a bed of japchae (crunchy veg on Korean glass noodles, thin noodles made from sweet potato starch) — continues; the chicken has come to an end, but the japchae made the base for a fantastic herbal soup that has so far provided two meals and will give me two more. All of this done with takeout, household staples, and a microwave. I do not cook — that’s long gone — but I am a demon assembler.
Like modern American Christmas, modern American Thanksgiving is an event celebrated with food, companionable gatherings, and pageantry, but Christmas also has tons of music, in a variety of genres. Which Thanksgiving largely lacks. A fact that led Laura Whitton Bonnett to post on Facebook on the day itself:
We were trying to find Thanksgiving music to enjoy during cooking.
LWB then offered a few suggestions for appropriate Thanksgiving music, taking the search into two genres; and I ventured into two more. Suggestions that are no longer of much use this year, so save this posting for next November.
It’s penultimate November and the day after Black Friday, and the leftovers from Thanksgiving — my leftovers, being quirkily Korean, are surely not much like yours, but I have them and they are wonderful — will live again in other meals for several more days. And familiar old tv shows will be re-run as a background of pleasant memories.
Today’s re-runs are from the early days of the American police-procedural tv series NCIS. This morning, in the S4 E1 program “Shalom” (from 9/19/06), came a moment described in the episode summary as:
Tony remarks that Sacks is a self-centered, egotistical jackhole
You don’t need to know who Tony and Sacks are, because my interest in the summary is entirely in its notable final word, boldfaced above. A way of calling someone a jackass and an asshole without using a dirty word. The ass is silent. Twice. Only the respectable remnants of the insults are left over.
Now, jackhole isn’t a fresh discovery, even on this blog — though 2006 is 10 years earlier than the cite that set off an earlier posting of mine, “jockhole”, from 9/28/16 (which makes today’s posting “jockhole 2”). Return with me now to that posting.
As soon as the sun rose on November 1st — All Saints Day — the Christmas music began. All of it, including the two monumentally maddening hammer-stroke repetitive songs “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “The Little Drummer Boy”. My first thought for a remedy — a bullet to the brain to everyone who plays either song in public (everyone is welcome to play them behind closed doors, with effective acoustic insulation in place, of course; I am not an uncivilized monster) — turns out to be not only illegal, but also immoral; no matter what the provocation, aesthetic violence, especially of the fatal variety, apparently offends the sensibilities of our society.
So I propose a different remedy: removing miscreants from the public sphere, cordoning them off where their songs can no longer disrupt people of good will, while meting out a punishment that truly fits the crime. Not aesthetic execution, but aesthetic imprisonment:
A Mick Stevens cartoon, from the 8/17/81 issue of the New Yorker
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate November; it’s a beautiful bright fall day here in Palo Alto, the day after the costumes and candy of Halloween, and also The Day of the Dead, to honor those who have died before us
This posting is a continuation of yesterday’s “Medicine Day”, a list — an alarming inventory — of the medically significant conditions of my life, very roughly in chronological order. I admitted that the list was surely incomplete, and in fact I was driven to get up in the middle of the night to construct a second list, almost as big as the first.
But I will hold that recital of afflictions off for a bit, to entertain you with a note on one of my grand-child Opal’s favorite Halloween candies and one on yellow-orange marigolds for Mexican remembrances of the beloved dead.
