Positive Liberty

It’s the Jamies’ it’s “Summertime Summertime.” The most musically inventive song of 1958. What, does he think the song doesn’t go with his shrimp?

So for the last five days, we’ve been more or less snowed in. DC is a complete, utter mess; the trains haven’t run regularly; federal government offices have been closed; and the Cato Institute — reasoning perhaps that when the feds close down, our work is done — has been closed as well.

I try to avoid grocery stores whenever there’s a shopping panic. I’ve got a very well-stocked pantry and could survive comfortably for I figure a couple of weeks without so much as leaving the house. And the lines, of course, are totally not worth it.

But as most of you know, we’ve got a new baby in the family, and she constantly needs a variety of different things in unpredictable amounts… so… I’ve been to the grocery store three times in the last, disaster-filled week.

It’s been very weird to watch what sells and what doesn’t:

• Meats sell much faster than vegetables. Although there were plenty of veggies, the meat section looked like the Soviet Union.
• Ramen noodles? All gone!
• Fish? Giant gave up on them. There weren’t any fresh fish to be had, probably owing to shipping problems, and they left the lights off at the fish counter.
• Salt? None to be had. Perhaps people are using table salt on their driveways. But…
• Sugar? No white sugar either.
• Flour? Almost gone!

People, I know who you are. I watch your shopping carts in good times and bad. You don’t bake. I know, too, because I bake, and because — as an amateur baker — I’ve got around twenty pounds of different flours sitting around the kitchen at any given moment. It wouldn’t even occur to me to “stock up” on flour for a blizzard. But you, who buy Stouffer’s TV dinners in good times, buy flour in bad. Flour that you probably couldn’t figure out how to eat if you had to.

Want further proof (pardon the pun) that panic shoppers don’t know what they’re doing? The yeast wasn’t anywhere near sold out, and you’d need way more yeast than what was on sale to leaven all that flour.

As for me, I’ve got a sourdough starter. And by the looks of the weather report, I’m going to need it.

Here. No it’s not the Turkey episode, but just as good. It’s the alcohol reaction time episode.

[Warning: Hulu inserts commercials.]

When I was a kid, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was my favorite book. I read it at least two dozen times. I kept count. Ah, second-grade fandom.

There was another book, however, that I believe I read only once. This, as I recalled, was the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. But, I told myself recently, my memory of this book couldn’t possibly have been right.

Nothing could be that weird. There was like, the stuff about the president, and carnivorous shapeshifting space aliens burning up in the atmosphere, and the people who were negative years old? Did I dream it? Or was it sort of like the late Nietzsche, where it’s still totally brilliant, but with every third line you ask yourself whether the author had finally gone round the bend?

So I looked it up, and sure enough, there it was, in all its unearthly glory, more or less as I’d remembered it. Dr. Seuss, meet H. P. Lovecraft.

In other kids’ lit news, I’d had no idea that Ingrid Bergman starred in a film adaptation of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (and another with Lauren Bacall!). A weird book, to be sure, but it’s got nothing on The Great Glass Elevator. I’m going to have to watch this one.

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its flavor be restored? — Matthew 5:13-16

Those who once viewed New York City as the modern Sodom & Gomorrah have variously been saddened or elated by the great city’s growing embrace of the metropolitan equivalent of the Nanny State. First came the Disneyfication of Time Square, sweeping away much of the open air flesh markets, midtown nonprescription drug dealers and Three Card Monte hustlers. Then came the smoking ban. Most recently, Nurse Bloomberg and Co. have fought the good fight against trans-fats and high calorie menus. And now these same protectors of the public health have set their sights on “voluntary” reductions in our intake of salt.

For our own good, of course. Continue Reading »

Check it out before YouTube pulls it. It’s from 1981 and has the legendary Mark O’Connor on violin.

Kerry Livgren of Kansas has made an incredible recovery from his near fatal stroke: Continue Reading »