One year ago today: February 16, 2015, Winter Haven, FL
Five years ago today: February 16, 2011, remember Cash Cab?
Nine years ago today: February 16, 2007, clean restroom $1.00.
Random years ago today: February 16, 2012, Super Bowl, 2012.
MORNING
What in creation is going on out there today? I never heard any hurricane warnings. Good thing I’m all stocked up with coffee and fixin’s. What a nice day to say goodbye to so many Canadians. A conspiracy could not have worked better against them this year. Only three or four days of good weather all season, and those were widely spaced. My immediate neighbor on the west left on a cruise today. Visibility is around sixty feet. And they won’t be setting any deck chairs out in this wind.
With no replacement pending for the bakery, here is a photo of making my own biscuits. My jet lag from the trip on the 9th has jolted me back to my working days, getting up like a robot at 6:36AM. As you can imagine, my ability to make perfect biscuits from scratch made me immensely popular at scout camp, although I was not the cook. But demand was so high, I was spared from duties such as dishwashing, which I hate even today. What, you want more information on scout biscuits? Okay.
If you look close, you will see these are cheese and ham biscuits and you’ll spot my soup can “rolling pin”. While there was talk that I could only make good biscuits on a “camp oven” because I had a wood stove at home, nobody adequately explained why none of my five brothers or sisters ever could. The camp stove consisted of an empty cookie tin, and the trick was watching the biscuits, because there was no way to govern the oven temperature.
The ingredients are self-rising flour, shortening, and milk. That’s reconstituted Carnation, but I’ve used powdered at times. You don’t get a recipe because there are hundreds of them out there, and it is on the side of most flour bags. They all work fine, if you pay attention on when to pop them out of the oven. Just keep the oven hot, it’s about ten minutes. Just enough time to make up the next batch of dough. And I remember you always had to make 48 or somebody would complain.
Keep in mind, back then there were no concerns about allergies. Lard was cheap, butter was expensive, and bread was the only ubiquitous baked good at the store. I fried everything in lard and never had a problem. There were no fat kids back then, well, except what’s-his-face, but he was also like 11 or 12 years old in fourth grade.
Here’s the green article for today. Where is all the litter in America coming from? Top two culprits are fast food packaging and cigarette butts. I’m guilty on another count. Almost daily, I buy the entire newspaper just to get at the puzzle page. Come to think of it, that is probably my most wasteful regular purchase. Why those dirty rotten newspapers, killing trees like that! They should save the environment and give me the crossword puzzle for free.
Still the oldest monument.
NOON
The interesting aspect of this animation is not apparent. Most would take it to be a composite photo of the phases of the Moon. What is not apparent is how the Moon “wobbles”. The same face of the Moon always faces the Earth, yet the Moon’s orbit is not circular. As it moves around in an ellipse, it speeds up and slows down. It has to wobble to keep the same side toward us. It is somewhat apparent here how the Moon does visually vary considerably in size between the near and far points of orbit.
NIGHT
To the foreign cinema. There was actually a non-you-know film on feature, called “45 years”. It was a chick flick, so I just pretended another you-know was beside me. Because I was there alone, I mean. I was the 4th paying customer and already there was a fat lady in my chair. Here was a movie for the film festival and critics crowd. This lady, married 45 years, begins to harbor doubts about her twenty-years older husband because he has a few photos in the attic of another woman.
OMG, how is the wife supposed to deal with that? She starts agonizing over it, and that is basically the plot. The movie is low budget and contains a totally unnecessary scene of old people doing the wild thing. Yet, it moves along well and so, yeah, you should probably take the toots out to see it. Like, show how sensitive you are, type of thing, you sly bastard. The poor old man doesn’t know what he’s up against by being mostly honest, so sympathy for his predicament means you won’t fall asleep right off. Methinks.
The scenery is mostly what looks to be dreary English moors, that, and they drive on the wrong side of the road, those are your main clues. It touches on the aspect that people can live in a fairly large and fancy house and still be lonely and insecure. I’m the other side of that coin. You can live in a place that’s way too small and be quite content with your lot. At least I don’t have some woman sitting around inventing notions about my exploits as a teenager in a band before I met her.
For those who follow my advice to patronize the foreign cinema, bear in mind that it could also be called a lot of other things. There is always another and another Holocaust movie on the way, each one striving to outdo the one before. In case anyone has missed the message, one supposes. There are always those pinball machines next door. There is an upcoming movie about some sheep farmers which I will likely go to see simply because the theme is so non-American.
Last Laugh
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