OO Wall O' Text Time!

 

I've written about the weirdness between my mother and food any number of times. Thing is, it was due to that state of affairs that I developed an interest in food, and found that cooking was something I liked and was fairly good at.

Yes, my mom waved around a copy of The Good Housekeeping Family Cookbook. It was always lying open on the dining room table. What was written in those pages, though, bore very, very little resemblance to what came off the stove in our house. Very little. I mean very, very, super, way not anything like anything that resembled food. 

It was like that, and often it was deliberate, and punitive. Or just not there at all. "Do it yaself!" she'd say one day. And she'd go on strike. 

So yeah, OK.  I did it myself.* 

OOO, did that steam her socks!

This did nothing to lessen the weirdness around food in our house, of course. But I did get fed.

So you see, that's why it was such a THING for me to finally confront The Good Housekeeping Family Cookbook irl.

It's sitting here right now. I still feel very, very weird about having it in my house. I'll probably donate it, unless one of you wants the thing.* 
__________________________________________

My Mother's Weirdness

The memory of things like famine, starvation on the plains, horrendous conditions in Europe, battles, poverty and privation in general were not long ago in people's minds back in the 1960's, in my part of the world. Shit, my parents and all the older people I knew had living memories of that stuff. They learned to cook according to the rules of poverty and want. What little you had you made into stew in order to stretch it, and whatever you had went in the pot, no matter what it was. What you were able to get was usually not the best, so you boiled it to death to 'kill the germs', which fit in nicely with the Everything Stew mindset. You ate what was thrown at you and didn't complain.

 
And honestly, all those old-time things we used to get yelled at us - "Ya never complained! They'd whip ya! Whip ya and throw you outside! You never thought to complain! You didn't think nothin' about how it tasted 'cause it was what ya had! You didn't want it? It went to the pigs and you lost out, and ta hell witcha!' and et cetera; you heard it often enough and came to realize that those people didn't want to let go of that mindset. Not at all. Maybe they couldn't, because plenty was a new and untrustworthy concept to them. It describes my parents, and my grandparents. Not even living in their own clean, quiet home in the suburbs, with more than enough money to get everything they needed, with a grocery store less than half a mile away, could quiet the terror.

There was also that 'culture of poverty' thing to sort out, too. Oh, those 'Good Old Days' I got so sick of hearing about.  They weren't good at all.  The flipside of that jolly 'Aw, we didn't realize we were poor when I was growing up!' bullshit was a squalid, grinding, abusive way of life where everyone was keeping everyone equally miserable and unable to imagine anything better, that went all the way back to the fucking Stone Age.  Kids were whipped for admiring things in store windows. People were called out in church, and mocked and ridiculed by their neighbors for buying any new thing. They learned early on that they were not worthy of better. 

My dad eventually got over it.

My mom did not.

My mom did not, I suspect, because in addition to being born Irish and poor in the worst slum in New York, she spent more than half of her childhood there in a Catholic orphanage.

Let that sink in. 

I mean just imagine that shit. She had all these insane, grotesque attitudes concerning sin, punishment, fasting and worthiness in addition to all of the previously mentioned poverty horseshit.

I think someone gave her The Better Homes and Gardens cookbook when she got married. By the time I came along, it looked like it had been kicked for ten miles down a mud road. When I got my copy, I was shocked to find that it had yellow divider cards, and a plastic thingie that makes turning the pages easier. It's in pretty good condition. I don't think it was used much. Truthfully, I don't think my mothers' copy was used much either. It lay open at hand, at all times, but I don't remember her actually consulting the pages. 

 Like I said in a previous post, bringing that thing into my house has brought up a lot of stuff for me. I was absolutely not expecting that.

Last week I found it an estate sale over in Ontario Oregon, way out in the weeds in a storage place.  I thought 'You know what, I'm 66. I think I'm over this now' and bought it for a buck. Maybe I'd get a few laughs out of it.

The instant I put that thing in the car I started feeling really, really weird, and it just kept getting worse. Fuck; maybe it was the ghost of my mom. More likely it was the ghost of my moms' overboiled sauerkraut made with big blubbery pieces of mystery fat, raisins and caraway. But I fought through, and I read the whole thing cover to cover. And here we are!  Look at us! We survived!

_________________________

So that is the story of What The Fuck Is My Problem With The Better Homes and Gardens Family Cookbook. It is a tangled tale full of armchair anthropology, bad memories, and way too much caraway. I hope it has cleared up things for you.

If not, you should go put your car up on a lift.

Don't forget to wear your socks.

___________________________________________

*We can discuss shipping here:  redace1960ATgmailDOTcom

Thank you all for your good wishes!

OK now honestly enough of that.  The Biker is doing amazingly well, you guys.  He feels so good, in fact, that he has to be reminded that his ass just had a heart attack and that no, he cannot take the motor out of the truck and work on it.  

Yes.  

And this, of course, he must protest, because he is a Biker, but he hasn't taken the engine out of the truck yet so things are progressing well.

Me?  My neck is fine. It's all  healed and you can't even make out a scar! My pain level is almost nil.  I can type again without making 500000 mistakes, and so here I am with

                                  THE COOKBOOK OF HORROR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11                                                  omgwtfbbvq   

Yes, kids, this is the very book.  

It's taken me until this year of our Lord 2026 to purchase (for a buck) this thing and actually bring it into my house.  

Even then, when I got to this page 

...and this ^^^ recipe....

I had to set it aside and go out for a couple of hours to get my shit together.   I drive around. I cried a little. Some stuff came up. I mean not my lunch, so that was OK, but still.

                         Lets cheer ourselves up with some lovely food photography!

There, that's better.

After a thorough perusal, I determined that I had not being singled out by the Better Homes And Gardens company after all, those many years ago.  

In the hands of an average mom (who did not smoke four packs of Marlborough Straights a day), you could get an OK meal out of this thing. 

Now, I'm not saying that the BHAGC didn't make it really, really easy to turn out an inedible mess because, I mean, it did. 

Gravy was seldom desired. Hot water was.  And that 'til tender'? How tender? If one hour is good, then won't two hours be better?

Remember, the bread used was Wonder Bread. Absolutely the most vile meatloaf imaginable. Karo Syrup; my God.

The kind of botched, horrifying, pseudo-German recipe that made it onto far too many tables in my childhood. With caraway.

The 'pressure pan' page.  

They mean a pressure cooker. 

GOD just say it out loud! PRESSURE COOKER! 

You don't want to because you know it's an implement of destruction don't you, Better Homes!

What went in came out looking like the contents of the barrel they put Lord Nelson into when he died at sea, and (assumedly) tasted about as appetizing. 

OK what the actual fuck. 

What the FUCK. 

No, really now! What the fuck??!!

ADD ONE POUND SLICED PEACHES????? 

ONE POUND OF SLICED PEACHES? 

ONE POUND OF SLICED FUCKING PEACHES?

Crisp peppers were never chosen. No, stuffed peppers must always be flubby. Pale green, wrinkled, shriveled and and flubby, looking something like the Jolly Green Giants' scrotum, and swimming in water.

Anybody out there remember candied dill pickles?  Sadly, I do. I also remember my uncle Sonny barbecuing these things, and them catching on fire like a flock of oiled bats, and him slinging them off the skewer into the bushes beside the garage and then blaming their dog Buddy for eating them when my aunt Lilian asked what happened.

Only today do I realize what that man must have suffered at Lil's table. 

With a little common sense, though, you could just skip those recipes.  And honestly, not even my mom looked at this

                     

...and thought 'hey, that sounds dee-licious!' because no, it does not.  Noone sane would attempt this.  I mean, my aunt Lilian would, but that just proves the rule.

Now I'm going to go hand wash my delicates. 

                                                                      You should too.

Not the Met Gala

Nope.   Yesterday evening, The Biker had a heart attack.

Fuck.

I drove him to emergency - luckily, just three minutes down the road - and they got him stabilized, and then he was transported to Boise to have another stent put in.  

That's been done.  He came through it like a champ!  And he's coming home tomorrow!

 This is his second heart attack.  He had the first one seven years ago in the middle of being monitored on a treadmill at the hospital, so he was definitely in the right place if he absolutely had to have a heart attack. It was handled quickly and they sent him home.  He hung out for a few days and then he was back to normal.

This time he was lying in bed reading.

I guess this is how it goes.  Ya get old.

 

NO LONGER SHORT

 Nope! Thanks to modern medical science I am 2 mm taller, thanks to a plastic thingie they stuck in me. 

Oh, and it's held on with a metal plate and metal screws they screwed into my bare, bleeding vertebrae that they cut all the meat and skin and tendons and things loose from, and then they grabbed all the meat and skin and tendons together and looped it back with wires through my fat. Fact. There are surgical wire holes in my neck flub, which finally seems to have found a brief but important purpose to exist. Hooray neck flub! 

 But like even my carotid sinuses and other important shit in your neck. They flooped it over to one side in a bunch and sewed it to random places in my vital bodily flub so they could root around in my spine.

Oh and my trachea and esophogus too. Yup. Just schlorped it all over to the other side and wired it to my other neck flub that I have.

What I am trying to say is that I know nothing about what actually happened to me during surgery and I'm just going by what the aftermath feels like, because there  have been numerous sensations, and various holes. Oh and the entry scar, which they lovingly matched to one of my neck wrinkles.

Oh! When they woke me up, I remember that!

I had a tube in my neck. They didn't sew up the hole. It was just there, and the nurse was pointing it out to me in a mirror. 

Why were we standing in front of a mirror?

That was when she pulled the surgical drain tube out, which felt really really strange, like swallowing a big piece of celery, only on the wrong side of my neck. Plus it made a sound.

It went 'shliiippblip'. 

And a rather large vinyl hose full of really thick blood wandered past my field of vision, so, like, and it was MY really thick blood ooging around in that hose. Then OMGWTFBBQ here on the end of the hose came a rubber bladder full of all the gleeg that came out when they were using a literal surgical Dremel to go sticking foreign objects into my spinal canal. 

There was a lot. 

The nurse handed it to me for me to hold while she got the rest of the hose bunched together, and I stood there holding an intimately warm bag full of chunks and fluids. In my hand. It was mine.

She said 'Thanks' and gathered it and tossed it in the wastepaper basket. 

That made a sound too.

And I stood there and I had a big hole in my neck and it was possibly full of the same gak.  I was the only one who cared.  The nurse briskly stuck a cotton ball on it and gave it a strip of tape. 

Go home now!  Farewell! Go be in a car! Bye bye!

So I left.

_________________________________

I could barely get that ^^^ typed out! Not even for fun and games!  It took me about an  hour and a half. I felt weird the whole time. Like I was going to faint.  It was a novel sensation, and so I persisted, and there ^^^ you have the result.

___________________________________

I am phobic when it comes to medical shit, and I never know when I'm going to act it out or what I'll do.  I can go to fifty doctors appointments, get shots, do whatever, and have no problem. On visit fifty one, I'll be shaking and crying and gibbering, my legs will give out, I'll faint, or whatever stupid thing.  This is me! After therapy!  And I'm told I'll have to live with it.

Anyway, I'm glad the Biker was there to keep me on track; and because he was there, I didn't do anything extreme or embarrassing. 

That I know of. 

Does that bother anyone else?  I hate thinking about what kind of stupid thing I might do or say while under sedation - or what the staff is saying about me when I'm under - or the worst one, which is wondering 'Are they interrogating me for laughs?'  (Because that really happened to me up at OHSU in 1979.)

______________________________

So I am a couple of mm taller.  

My right leg no longer feels like it's being barbecued from the inside.

I can now use my left hand, which was impossible last week.

I can now sleep without using five pillows and an ice pack, which was impossible last week.

I can drive, which was impossible last week.

I can go up and down a flight of stairs. 

I no longer hold my right arm four inches higher than my left.

The left side of my face is no longer all schnurled up like Long John Silver.

I had no idea I was such a mess until I woke up from surgery and suddenly I was not anymore.  

I was becoming an elderly Frenchman.

And that's about all I have to say about that.

Charbonneau at Tanasbourne near Windemere by Salishan

 

So I sat down today and I thought to myself 'Self, you haven't read 'The Redstocking Manifesto' since you were 20.'  So I found a copy of that sapsucker online and I read it.  Know what?  I still agree with it.  Except for the part where everyone's problems have to be worked out as a community. Otherwise, we need that shit today and it needs to be shouted from the mountaintops.

.....from which vine I swing gracefully to the subject of Idaho.

Oh Idaho.

Today I was walking down to my favorite female owned and operated business, gonna git me some duck eggs, and at the crosswalk, as I politely waited at the corner, all four directions of traffic came to a halt, and I was waved on with many a big beardy smile and a-twiddling of 'g'head!' fingies on the wheel. And I do not have a problem with being allowed to cross at an intersection. Allah did not mean for people to do burnouts on me. No, I noticed because I was in a mood to notice shit like that, having just read 'The Redstocking Manifesto' again.

After all these years, are acts of male courtesy like that just a matter of 'Grown People Being Nice To Old People'?  Or is it 'The Same Old Shit Where We Pretend To Be Nice To Old Ladies So We Don't Get Arrested When What We Actually Want To Do Is To Burn Them All At The Stake Because They  Aren't Pretty Anymore Plus They Can Be Cranky'?

_________________________________

Which brings me to what's really bugging me:  I have to get an operation in four days.  They're going in through my throat to get to my cervical vertebrae, and then they're going to pry them apart and Dremel out the spinal canal for a few inches, suck out all the crud, and then release me back into the wild. 

Why the rush? Yes, I have spinal stenosis, like I mentioned awhile back - it's just that none of us realized how severe it was. And it's gnarly in there.  Cue the surgeon with the DremelRRRRRRIIINGDEDINGDINGDINGDINGrrrrrrrr *sound of chunks hitting the walls*

In another year, they'll be doing the same thing to my lower back. 

My, how I'm looking forward to that. I mean of course I am; I can barely walk some days, but still...it's surgery. In a hospital. 

God how I wish I'd never seen Hellraiser II.

______________________________________

Hell yeah, Rogers.

                                                             

No longer titty pink!

!!!HOORAY!!!!!

And some coleus that need to be potted up.

How guns are sold here. Just kind of stacked on grocery shelves, no clerk, little kids roaming around with boxes of ammo....

 

________________________________

Milton-Freewater After Dark

 This:

RANDOM SHOTS WHAT I SAVED

Seen here:

....better keep that problem weenis under control, ya perv

BEHOLD

the Jack Links Bigfoot.  A sexy beast indeed.

The full image of what is on my John Cleese T-Shirt. Men fear it, women swoon.

BEHOLD: The picture what I tooked offline showing the old Rancho FirstNations 4 feets underwater - circled by a circle up there on the center right.

OMGWTFBBQ.

ALSO NAKED vvv and including A POME

Motherfucker was crazy about guac, children.

If only Micky would find me some. 

Fuckin' rat.

BEHOLD:  Leonard Nimoy has recipes. 

_________________________________________

You'd think Spring would have sprung here. We've experienced warmer temperatures, things are budding and blooming and all that happy crap, but NO.  No, coming in about 45 minutes there will be a sudden 'freeze event' occurring - the temperature is going to plummet to 20f and stay that way until 9pm, and then an hour later it's going to do the same damn thing and last until 10am tomorrow morning.

WTF.

We've also experienced at least four 'downburst' events. One just happened a half-hour ago. The sky gets dark, the wind drops, and then suddenly the rain comes cannoning out of the sky, the thunder is non-stop, and cars have to pull over to the side of the road. This one, like all the rest, lasted about ten minutes, and then all of a sudden someone hit the switch and hey! No more rain! No more hail! The sun is shining!

I am trying to grow tomato plants in containers, and I had to go hustling outside and run the things in 
like a noodge, like I'm raising baby chickens or something, while the rain beat down. And now we're expecting not just one but TWO FREAK FREEZES and I am just done. 

Honestly what does the Universe expect of me. 

Shit. 

Please.

______________________________

OK it is forty minutes after I wrote the weather stuff up ^^^ there.  The Temperature is supposed to be dropping.  It is not. It has risen to 60f.

The sky is once again black.

The wind is howling (actual noise!) in from the West, straight down the street.

It blew my doormat away.

                                                   FUCK THIS DRAMA

I am going to go crack a beer.

You should too.

Westward Hoes

A few years back I mentioned that I had a John Cleese t-shirt - and y'all lost your shit! OO OO lets see the John Cleese t-shirt! 

So today, finally, in an act of shocking revelation, I will reveal a rumpled, poorly-taken photo of myself wearing that selfsame garment!

But first, a little backstory.

I really wanted a Cleese t-shirt. First I hit up Mr. Cleese.com, of course - only to find out that yes, Mr. Cleese sells swag, but Holy Fucking Shit it costs a fortune. 

Clearly he is not wealthy enough.  

I was a bit peeved by this. 

So what I did was, I searched Gleegle images until I found a picture of him that was super, extra cheesy. I saved it, and then I went to Walmart.com and had them make me a t-shirt. You just shoot them the image you've saved - any image you want! and the size you need, and they do the rest.

Except they got the size wrong. 

My John Cleese t-shirt is quadruple extra large.

As you can kind of see, it fits me like a deflated kiddie pool:

Mr. Cleese would be appalled. * Hee hee hee.   

_______________________

Holy SHIT I forgot Aretha Franklins' Birthday! GOD I SUCK

OO but look what we have here!  Vibrant and glorious, in splendor like the sun!  

There are safety gays and safety gals! 

Tight buttocks and big hair!

Extra Mod set - check!  

So here you go, my darlings:

Yeah you BETTER watch it.

____________________________________________

It may or may not come as a surprise that The Biker and I spend about $20.00 a month on incense. We do. Really.  

I was going somewhere with this information, but I forgot where.

______________________________________

I can saunter down the street in my lounge pants, Crocs, and Star Fleet Academy t-shirt, and purchase duck eggs. I can. At the same place you can get goose eggs and free-range chicken eggs too - and those chickens are really free range; you can drive past the lady's house and see them out running around.  The same place sells local honey, local sourdough bread, cupcakes, pastries, and local cheese. 

What is this wonderful place?  An antique store - and a good one, too. They make a fair bit of money off us.

_______________________________________

...except for when it comes to bread. Oh no  no no no no.

I still make all our bread every three or four days:

I make almond biscotti too.

Yeah that's right.  

________________

*

This is definitely the image I'll be wearing on the next Cleese T-shirt I get.

 

Nero on fiddle, me on bass

I've been battling depression lately.  It's been pretty bad. That's where I've been.

Every single time I've gone to post these past weeks my country - well, Trump - has committed another atrocity. I do a lot of trivial shit here at Steve. Nothing kills the inspiration to revel in trivial shit like global atrocities. I mean, I already had climate anxiety and now this constant barrage of....yeah, well.

I made the mistake of trying to divert myself by lurking on Reddit. THIS WAS A BAD IDEA. I'm going to go as far as to say that if you are prone to depression, avoid Reddit like the very plague. Not because of the site content so much as how Reddit operates; which is, like the actual fucking Borg. I have a lot to say about that, but for now I'll just say that it made my depression far worse, very quickly.

I'm on a news fast now, and I'm feeling better for it. 

              If the world goes to shit, I'll find out when the mushroom cloud rises over the horizon. 

 

   

It gets dark. But not quite as dark as originally written, so that's ku.

I am a genius and if you've ever doubted that stop it this instant. I just figured out how to cure fungus gnats in houseplants without resorting to chemical means or using a vaccuum cleaner. How did I achieve this miracle?

I found some little house spiders - the kind that make the tiny little webs along the baseboards and in corners? - and re-homed them to my plants.  Two days later the Biker and I are noticing a distinct lack of gnats flapping around. A week later and I found two little spider middens in my plant tower, full of little gnatty corpses.

Am I worried that the spiders will get fat and huge and start preying on dogs?  No. We don't have a dog.

_________________________

Where have I been.

I have been to St. Lukes Imaging Center, where I was stuffed into an MRI machine. This made me feel kind of like a sausage. They were terribly concerned with my head for some reason (I went in for spinal problems) and so they out my head into a plastic cage - thingie, which was not as unpleasant as it sounds. I had a mirror contraption so I could see the in and out of the MRI chamber and be reassured that I was not being digested by modern science, and that was nice. I also had a little breeze blowing in there, which I found odd but not at all unpleasant.  The scanner-bed slid me back and forth like a pizza at unannounced intervals, which made me yip. At one point I felt as though I was slowly being brought up to the boiling point, and I almost bailed.  Apparently the MRI waves heat up the iron in your blood.

No shit. That's what they told me. It did not make me feel better. It made me feel like I'd pissed off Magneto.

Turns out I have spinal stenosis.  Whaddya gonna do.

___________________________

I wrote some other stuff here about the Epstein Files and me wanting to go live in a fucking barrel, like Diogenes, only without Diogenes hope in finding an honest man. Wow, look at me all referring to Diogenes and shit!  But I decided not to put that vibe out there. I will, however, reiterate my closing declaration:

It's time we fucking RISE.

Shirtless, Shoeless, No Propeller

A wonderful thing just happened here at the El Apartmento!

BEHOLD:

I got it halfway out of the package and I was giggling!

The Biker came over to see and his eyes lit up!  I told him "I want you to be the first to go through this" because I love him 'n shit. And I handed it over.

 Then I hung over him and was a nuisance until he read it.

 

If you are not a fan of Tony Bourdain, you won't like this. It is pretty Bourdain (tm). 

If you are a fan of Bourdain, get this book IMMEDIATELY. It is pretty Bourdain(tm).

 

I read this book in one sitting and loved it. But honestly, I won't be cooking out of it right away.  

______________________________________________

Dear Mme. Arcati:

Elizabeth Davids' A Book of Mediterranean Food has just arrived yesterday and I cannot put it down!

I made her Pate of Chicken Livers this morning, and it is ASTOUNDING.  The only thing I did differently was to use a Glad Reuseable 

container instead of a small earthenware crock because I am plumb out of small earthenware crocks. 

Note that I could not wait to try out these recipes.  What a stellar  recommenation this was! 

Thank you!!!

____________________________________________

Ashley Gavin. Because lesbians make everything better!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yId_uC-Iaw8

https://x.com/AshGavs/status/1252638120182456324

 

 

Misadventures with Wine + stuff

NOTE:  I pulled the trigger in this one before I could talk myself out of it. 

We are not wine drinkers here at the El Apartmento. Not by any stretch of the imagination.  But we are wine consumers, in that we use the stuff as a cooking ingredient.

As ingredients, then, we prefer to use a garbage Merlot, and a garbage Chardonnay, the nastiest, cheapest ones on offer, in case I didn't make myself clear.

Not thinking, as seems to happen a lot lately, I put 'garbage white' on the grocery list, presuming that The Biker would get the usual.

He did not.

He got a Moscato.

He got Barefoot Wineries White Moscato..

He did not look when he bought it.

And I did not look when I opened the bottle. 

 

I was feeling saucy that afternoon, so I tipped a little into a glass and took a sip. All my jungle instincts kicked in as it hit the back of my tongue. I turned to the sink, spat it out, dumped the glass, grabbed the bottle, ran for the terlet and flushed it all. One long fluid movement from sip to flush, like a ballet. 

Like this ballet.

I don't blame the Biker a bit. And I never said a word about it. 

 But today I did this:

OO!  OO!  Wha'd it taste like wha'd it taste  like OO OO

OK FINE I WILL TELL YOU.

It tasted like straight Karo syrup and mouthwash.

It even had a texture. 

It was like   

I'm not saying what I was going to say because it's too grosFINE OK.

It was like a slug. It was like as if someone had stepped on a slug, in your mouth.

See, you had to know, and now look at you.

______________________________________

I figured out how to tell the Conservatives from the Liberals here in Idaho. 

Any institution that has a lot of Hispanic people?  Is Liberal.  Or Liberal-er.  Or -ish.

Unless it's the Catholic church.  Catholicism here is its own special brand of....this: "That Guy In Rome": A Catholic Town in Idaho Where The Pope is a Heretic | Religion Dispatches 

Have I made you uncomfortable?  Good. I know I am. Now I have company.*

_________________________________________

OK here's what I've figured out:

A Vape place is a tiny hole-in-the-wall joint, usually with a drive-thru out back, that sells primarily vape juice and vaping thingies. (Not something I do, so yeah.) They might sell a little pop, they might have an expresso machine.  They all exhale a weird candy aroma, like those cherry-scented things they used to put in gas station toilets.

A Tobacco store sells conventional nicotene products - as long as they're made by Philip Morris. They also carry marijuana paraphernalia, doper lifestyle accessories (like a lighter shaped like a MAC 5 - ask Savannah, she has one in her purse) and black light posters, incense, and things that Snoop Dog has signed. Also craft beer, garbage beer, garbage wine and malt liquor. Oh and let's not forget the massive cases full of Kratom in various forms.

A liquor store sells liquor, beer, wine, malt liquor, mixers, pop, and a little bit of all the above ^^^. Also ice cream treats.

Unless you're up the road in Weiser, where it's just all one thing and they either call it Such and So's TOBACCO STORE or VAPE PLACE... and liquor, in little teeny letters. Along with a bunch of lottery ticket ads.

It would seem that people here are desperate to run shit through their livers. And also obvious that they feel guilty about it.  

There's a hierarchy of sin, too. 

Vape stuff is off the radar, but something really sketch is going on in those places, so black out the windows and put bars over the doors. 

Tobacco is bad for you, but at least it's not beer or wine, which is  bad-ER for you, so here, let's put that in a bag (seen above) so that nobody at all will guess in one million years that you have just bought alcoholic beverages. From the tobacco store.

But hard liquor, now, hey, that's REALLY SUPER EL FUCKING BAD SENOR so let's just put 150 signs advertising lottery tickets all over the place and advertise the tobacco and vape shit, wink wink. Nobody in two million and a half years will ever guess that you stopped in to buy HARD LIQUOR. You just go on now, clutching that long, skinny paper bag that nothing else in the world comes in, BY THE NECK, and we'll all...presumably pretend that this never happened, or something.

Man, Idaho, you are a TRIP.

________________________________________________________

*From my hometown, making me proud. They've been around for years. This is the ideal that I grew up with, in my town, in my neighborhood.

Thank God.

Or whoever.

This church is going viral for their openness and their sign game is epic (25 pics)

King Of All Waffles

Fifty Words for Snow  

My friends, when searching Hathi, IA, WikiSource, Perseus, DPLA et al gets frustrating, here you go - an easy to use, odd, kind of self-indulgent but not at all stupid, free E-BOOK site for all your ancient/medieval/renaissance/etc. eras up to about 1920? reading needs! 

Fifty Words for Snow  

You just look, you pick, you click, shit opens up, you read. Boom. 

Add it to your digital library links NOW.

Fifty Words for Snow  

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It was while I was at Fifty Words for Snow I found this:

The Cult of the Chafing Dish

...with my apologies to Mr. Peenee for taking so long to provide the link. (Let's test his memory.)

It is a cookbook centered around what arguably could be called the first 'fad' appliance - a chafing dish. Basically you were young, single, poor and living in the big city for the first time in some horrible little crappy room.  But we got you fam! Here! Have a chafing dish!! You can cook in that squalid little room in a pretty little pot OVER A FUCKING CANDLE FLAME OMGWTFBBQ *running in circles like a chihuahua*  - although a spirit lamp is the official line (what else can I do with this sentence?) and thus your ass will save money all over the place and will accrue all kinds of other benefits, including the ability to cure scabies by laying on hands like a monarch of the realm, which I made up.

Our author writes with such cheerful aplomb it's enough to make you laugh out loud, which I did several times, although I admit that in such matters I am a cheap date. Still, never have I enjoyed reading a cookbook so much! And there's footnotes! And outside links! And commentary by the owner of this site! 

GEEZE JUST READ:  The Cult of the Chafing Dish 

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Look what arrived three days ago!

One can never be too careful.

And look at all the swag!  INCLUDING BEER SOAP! Shit, it tastes just like beer, too.

Thank you Mr. Rimpy Rimpington!