“Playoffs?”
I had only had one entrant for the name the octopus and cactus contest from last week. Brent suggested “Squid Rock” for the octopus – get it? (a play on Kid Rock – Brent would say it isn’t funny if you have to explain it). Much better than “Blink” that I had come up with – he’s blue and shoots ink: bl-ink. I know – much lamer creativity. “Wily Peyote” was his best entrant for the plant. I like that better than “Tortoise” – my idea based on carrying your house on your back in a self contained and mobile unit. I’ll leave this open for one more week for late entrants before the official naming ceremonies.
Delbert McClinton was the special guest on the BoH Tuesday night supper club this week. It’s hard to believe he is 80 years old. I’ve mentioned before that I saw him at the sorely missed Caravan of Dreams club in downtown Fort Worth on my second night in Texas back in 1985. I was in heaven. Gordy told a similar story of going to see him at the classic honky tonk, Gruene Hall, in the late 90s. He made his way to the front row with his girlfriend, now wife, and Delbert sang an entire verse of a ballad to her while holding her hand. McClinton had a lot of good stories to share.
Vince and I have made a point of sampling many gourmet scotch eggs over the years on our work visits to New York. The current first place winner is from the Dead Rabbit cocktail bar in downtown. He sent me this recipe for a Pastrami scotch egg:
Here’s what the author had to say about these:
“Most Scotch eggs begin with loose sausage meat, befitting a dish with roots as an English roadside snack. But as I sat at Pastrami Queen on New York’s Upper East Side a few weeks back eating the city’s best deli sandwich (sorry, Katz’s), it dawned on me that pastrami had serious potential as a Scotch egg sausage swap-in. Crusted with a mixture of coriander, garlic, black pepper and mustard — and blessed with a prodigious fat streak — it has a spice blend that can stand up to even the best sausage meat, not to mention an immutable connection to the city I call my home.
Make sure you get the fattiest pastrami you can find (specify when you order a pound from your butcher), and please (I’m begging) don’t opt for turkey pastrami. You’ll also need to dust off the food processor for this one; giving the pastrami a high-speed whirl binds the meat into an ideal liaison, making it relatively easy to wrap around the eggs. Serve them with a mustardy dressing and your next New York deli-style craving may just be satisfied at home.”
I’m not a huge pastrami fan, but these do sound worth a try.
I received some uplifting news from Alex in New Orleans on Friday. Finally something to put on the calendar to look forward to – Jazzfest has been rescheduled for the 2nd and 3rd weekends of October. We’ll have to see about changing our flights that were booked for April. Should we go for the first or second weekend? Maybe just move into Denny and Anne’s cottage for both?
Diana had to wait until after 10am for her run on Saturday morning – that’s when the temperature broke into the 40s. I went upstairs to the elliptical while she was working much harder on the road. We rewarded ourselves with a trip to Filtered in downtown McKinney for coffee, crossword, and quiche.
After returning home, I was determined to try and fix Penelope’s cup holder cover latch. This has been a recurring problem for years and I’m usually able to jiggle it just the right way and get it closed. The last few days it has refused to play along. A replacement of the whole unit is available for over $300. With that information, it seemed like an hour or so of my time to attempt a repair was a good trade.
The hardest part of the endeavor was figuring out the location of the Allen bolts in the glove box that held the unit in place. That was a solid 20 minutes of effort to extract the annoyance.
That little white piece in the middle is the guilty party. It doesn’t seem to have quite enough weight to it to fall down and latch reliably. Cleaning and lubing didn’t help. I wonder what will happen if I attach a small piece of mounting tape on the top?
It certainly seemed to work with the top off and not mounted back in the car. I decided to give it a shot. Reattaching with the Allen bolts wasn’t quite as onerous as the extraction. Et voila merci!
That was a fun project – made more rewarding by the $300+ saved. I put air in Penelope’s tires (pressure too low with the cold weather), made some minor repairs to the convertible top, and bid her good night.
A nice steam shower session had me fully relaxed and ready to watch the Rams vs Packers playoff game.
We attempted to ordered Thai for dinner from the new “Spoon and Fork” restaurant – but no delivery option available. The old stand by of Zin Zen with their fungi salad and shrimp pesto flatbread worked out just fine.
We finished up Saturday watching the documentary “Carter: Rock and Roll President”. I really enjoyed this film as it showed how much Jimmy Carter enjoyed all kinds of music and what an impact various groups like the Allman Bros had on his election. A highlight was Bob Dylan quoting “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Synyrd at the end of the film and applying the lyrics to Carter:
“Take your time, don’t live too fast
Troubles will come, and they will pass”
Sunday began with a somewhat earlier run for both of us – temperatures were well into the 40s by 9am. Then we were off on some shopping return excursions to Target and Lulu Lemon. The latter unsuccessful as the wait line to enter the store was too long. The things I do…
I’ve been looking forward to the Saints vs Buccaneers playoff game all week. This photoshopped picture from Tom Brady is great. He will be the oldest quarterback to ever compete in a playoff game at 43 and Drew Brees is 41, making for by far the oldest quarterback combination in a game ever. Both are playing at a very high level and this should be a good game.
I read “& Sons” by David Gilbert this week. I really enjoyed Gilbert’s short story “Cicadia” in an August 2020 edition of the New Yorker and decided to try one of his novels – “& Sons” got great reviews on its publication back in 2013.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/cicadia
NPR said “Smart and savage…Seductive and ripe with both comedy and heartbreak, “& Sons” made me reconsider my stance on…the term “instant classic””
Do you ever look at the author photo inside the back cover of books and try to analyze what kind of person wrote this book? I am somewhat guilty of that. Here are two pretty different pictures of David Gilbert and then what he writes about one of the main characters of “&Sons”:
“A. N. Dyer stands in front of us as forever young, peering from his author photo, the only photo he ever used on all of his books, starting with “Ampersand.” In that picture he’s pure knowing, his darkly amused eyes in league with a smile that edges toward a smirk, as if he’s seen what you’ve underlined, you fiend, you who might read a few pages and then pause and glance back at his face like you’ve spotted something magical yet familiar, a new best friend waiting for you on the other end.”
I loved these two descriptions from a section where one of Dyer’s sons thinks he has successfully pitched a screenplay to a studio, only to find that it’s a ruse to get him to convince his father to offer film rights to “Ampersand”:
“”Well he’s still dead.” Rainer rose from his chair, like Oscar Wilde playing Winston Churchill getting bad news from the front.”
“The bubbles in the champagne shimmied up the flutes, a hundred phony smiles breaking the surface, like some Esther Williams routine, Richard thought, a memory of stinging sweetness flooding his mouth.”
I love the thought of champagne bubbles performing a synchronized swimming routine.
“He had always been a decent typist. (Thanks to Exeter, we were all decent typists.) The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy log. Instead of sheep he tried counting foxes, the image of fox inspired by the crafty Mr. Tod. Andrew loved Beatrix Potter as a boy, the fond memory of being read to aloud, the words coming on trails of smoke and scotch, his father’s wonderful voice.”
I was telling Diana about the beautiful illustrations in Beatrix Potter as we were reading a Winnie the Pooh story and admiring the drawings this week. Something she missed out on that we’ll have to remedy.
I enjoyed the number of Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime” references included in this paragraph:
“Twitchy and sweaty, with a brand-new retro haircut, horn-rimmed glasses, a vintage suit, a bow tie, he had the vibe of early-to-mid David Byrne, and what with Richard’s and Jamie’s appreciation for New Wave music and their teenage days watching those first videos on MTV, what with the water flowing underground and the large automobile, what with the early evening sky and its remains of light, you may find yourself hearing the same song and asking yourself the same question: How did I get here?”
This book was very large and broad in scale, albeit a bit pompous in places. I did enjoy the read and being back in New York for a while.
“Greenlights”, the recent autobiography by Matthew McConaughey was a much quicker and lighter read. It feels like sitting down and having a drink with the author and listening to entertaining and engaging stories about his life.
He attended the University of Texas in Austin to study law – hoping to be a criminal defense attorney, and while his grades were very good, he decided after 2 years that his heart really wasn’t in it and switched to the film school.
All the classic tales are in here – “Alright, Alright, Alright”, arrested for playing the bongos naked inside his house – later dropped for unlawful entry, the efforts McConaughey went to to land the lead role in Grisham’s “A Time to Kill”, and many others.
I particularly enjoyed a tale where he takes an impromptu trip to Mali in search of his favorite musician, Ali Farka Toure. This was a big surprise – I wasn’t sure anyone else in the state of Texas was familiar with this musician. I had been listening to Farka Toure’s excellent album with Ry Cooder earlier in the morning while starting the book. Weird.
I enjoyed reading McConaughey’s love letter to New Orleans.
“Places are like people. They each have a particular identity. In all my travels around the globe I’ve written in my journal about the culture of a place, its identity. If a place and a people move me, I’ll write them a love letter. New Orleans is one of those places.”
“Home of the front porch, not the back. This engineering feat provides so much of your sense of community and fellowship as you relax facing the street and your neighbors across it. Rather than retreating into the seclusion of the backyard, you engage with the goings-on of the world around you, on your front porch.”
“You don’t use vacuum cleaners, no, you use brooms and rakes to manicure. Where it falls is where it lays, the swerve around the pothole, the duck beneath the branch. Like a gumbo, your medley’s in the mix.”
I was pleased to read that on a recent episode of BBC radio’s desert island discs, David Gilmour, guitarist with Pink Floyd, picked the Kinks “Waterloo Sunset” as the number one disc he would take with him to a desert island. This would be one of mine too, as evidenced by the Ray Davies signed soundwaves painting of this song hanging in the piano room – thanks Diana.
Paul McCartney released a new album a few weeks ago. It’s the third installment in his series and is naturally called “McCartney III”. I enjoyed listening to the record but it’s not one that I’ll be rushing back to. I did enjoy this video by Roman Coppola (Francis Ford Coppola of Godfather and Apocalypse Now fame’s son). Coppola made this completely remotely from the family vineyard in Napa – utilizing 46 remote cameras to capture McCartney as he played all the instruments and built up the track. Oh to have ten percent of that talent.
That and the Coppolas – Sofia’s “Lost in Translation” with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson is one of my all time favourite movies. I use this Teams backdrop sometimes and put myself at the bar of the Tokyo Park Hyatt having a drink with Scarlett and keeping her safe from Murray:
I had the luxury of quite a bit of quiet reading time this week. I found myself on a Bob Dylan kick early in the week and a Brian Eno kick later in the week. Two entirely different artists for sure. I think I was looking for some calm and soothing escape as the week unfolded. I decided on a chronological Dylan exploration. Having never listened to “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” from 1963 from start to finish, I was astounded by the number of all time classics on this album – “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Girl form the North Country”, “Master of War”, and this favourite:
Brian Eno has a catalog almost as vast as Dylan’s, with quite a variety from his ambient albums, to soundtracks, and numerous collaborations. Here’s one that I hadn’t heard before and really enjoyed:
The weekend brought some jazz, having just introduced Alicia to the classic “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis, I explored some not heard before John Coltrane:
And another 80 year old, the guy with the amazing sax tone – Charles Lloyd:
Stay calm and patient with everyone.