Week one of life in the Fortress of Solitude ended this weekend, and I can assess the progress so far.
Am I lonely and miserable? Not at all. It helped that Daughter was here for 24 hours, and broke up the string of quiet days. The dog is good company, but we have our own routines. He naps in Natalie's room in the morning, bothers me at noon for lunch and a walk, spends the afternoon on alert in the sun porch looking for interloping mailmen, and hangs close in the evening before retiring to one of his many beds for a kip in the dark hours.
It helped to have a Sunday evening with the lads watching football, even though the game was lost. It wasn’t that the Vikings didn’t show up; they did, but alas, so did the other team. It is injurious to team spirit when you cannot get into the end zone. You have to get in there the first quarter with consummate skill, because that assures you it is possible. Staying the game with field goals is like thinking your marriage is going fine even though you’re only allowed to drop by the house once a week. And even then you never make it in the house, but have a nice chat on the porch.
Did I throw away every single damned bottle of expired syrup while performing pitiless triage on the cupboards? I did. They are Christmas presents, the same every year, unusual flavors. When you've maple on hand, the temptation to crack open that Rhubarb Syrup is infinitesimal. They have expired, and while they’re probably fine, the rule stands. If it is expired, it goes. I mistakenly threw out a jar of pickles, though. They never expire. Put those in a time capsule and they’ll be crunchy in 3035.
Speaking of which: I have always had a queasy feeling about this time capsule. You suspect that it will not be opened on schedule in 6939, and all the reasons that come to mind are unnerving. Elois and Moorlocks and all that.
Did I get all the Christmas decorations down by myself? I did, but I usually do. The difference this year were the bulbs Sara attached to the string of lights in the gazebo. She bound them with wire so they wouldn’t blow away. She twisted the wires to ensure they would stay. She did this on a warmish day. She did not have to undo the tight wire on a day where the temp was 2 above. I did it in shifts, like the men who ran out to shovel debris off the roof of Chernobyl, except I did not shout “I Serve the Soviet Union” before doing so.
It is an oddly inspirational and touching scene, for about 37 contradictory reasons. You admire them. You pity their pride in a system that regarded them as expendable. You sense the power of camraderie and duty. You glimpse a devotion to an ideal that was never realized, and a connection with Great War forebearers. It's all tragic and shabby.
I solved the static-ridden MPR radio problem. Mind you, I don’t listen to it, but my wife does when she’s in the master bathroom. Drives me nuts. Static. The sound comes from a radio / CD player from 2001, hooked up to the speakers in the wall. Very high tech, speakers in the wall - or so I thought when we moved in. For the last ten years I’ve just thrown my phone audio to a portable bluetooth speaker. This is not satisfying, at all. Well. I found a bluetooth dongle-thing I’d bought years ago to solve this very problem. I cannibalized some cords from the downstairs media unit no-one ever uses, because we no longer have a small child who goes downstairs to watch DVDs or has high-school friends over to watch Netflix, sigh. So I don’t need the cables. Hooked everything up, and IT WORKS! I’ve no idea what took me so long. It’s a game changer. .
Speaking of old tech . . .
This has been on the kitchen wall for a long time. It’s supposed to communicate with an outside sensor, but the sensor does not respond anymore. I thought “I should get another weather station, then,” until I realized: the phone tells me the temp. I don’t need this. Out it goes.
My dad had one of those, and it didn’t display the temperature, either. Eventually I fixed it. I remember where it was - in fact I can see his kitchen in great detail. I have been guided by his example when cleaning and tossing: he lived lean, but not overly so. There were legacy items in the cupboards, but not too many. The fridge was spare. My fridge is spare now. I’m living like he did, when he was alone, except instead of getting up to walk around the mall, then going to the office, I go the office, then walk on the treadmill.
Have I found a bottle that had an oddly inscutable phrase?
I don't know why we had this. Wife or child bought it. Stuck in the back of the hallway closet.
If you want health benefits of apple cider vinegar, you have to purchase the right kind – the kind with the mother. Read on to learn what it is, why it’s important – and how to choose a vinegar that still contains the mother.
In short, the mother is the “good stuff” that’s made during the fermentation process. You’ll spot it (her!) if you see clumps or strands floating in your ACV, especially at the bottom of the bottle.
Okay. but eww.
There's also been a bit of website work, including checking every page in the Motel section for egregious typos and bad links. This may sound like a minor thing but there are 2,500 pages in the site. That is a minimum of 7,500 links.
The week to come: five Bleats, three Substacks, an architecture piece for the paper, and staving off of a sense of compounding ennui, both general and specific. Wish me luck.
Oh, why not keep going? But instead of doing 1934, we're going to examine the trademarks of 1924, a hundred and one years ago.
I think the chance of finding something that's still around will be much less. But you never know.
No claim to the word Butter! Obviously. But it had to be said.
It's a peculiar term that's right, but not quite. No one ever says "my, your lawn looks nice and buttered." It's in the class of "Foods and Ingredients," so we can assume . . . what? That the cows were grass-fed? Was that important in 1924?
Hold on, what was I thinking. Why do 1924? It's 2025. Let me go clip 50 from the 1925 . . . okay, back.
Surely someone saw how this might appear. It's Damned Fine-O!
Perhaps we should set the stage anew for anyone who stumbled upon this page while trying to find new things to read in the coming year. This feature concerns exactly what it sounds like. Movies that are not in color. They're not reviews, and not really recaps, although some of that is inevitable. It concerns the look, the faces, the locations, and other interesting details of the Black and White World. That's it!
Russian-born Joseph Gershenson began his show-business career in 1920 as a conductor of orchestras in movie theaters. Hired by Universal Pictures for its music department, he was made the department head in 1940. Gershenson's name appeared on virtually every Universal film made as music supervisor from 1949 until his retirement in 1969.
A liquor sign, and I hope it was animated somehow.
It was! Barely.
I guess the was just a normal part of life in the big city. Schnockered guys passed out and drooling at the corner joint.
He's our protagonist.
Brian Keith comes in and slaps the drunk awake. Flashes a badge. And we’re off.
He takes him home . . .
Nice composition, in its own way. Not great, but they had to fill up the wide screen somehow.
The drunk is the husband of Officer Keith’s sister. She’s a newspaperwoman, and he's aa newspaperman. And she loves that craaaazy man of hers.
Turns out this is going to be an alcoholic picture, a post Lost Weekend SERIOUS LOOK at a SOCIETAL ISSUE. We get long sekf-pitying descriptions and justifications and self-castigations from the guy, who, as you can tell from below, is suffering from a horrible hangover, and looks wretched!
The wife gives her drunk husband one last chance: she knows that a famous criminal had plastic surgery and he’s coming to town tonight and he’ll be shot and she knows all about it and if he writes about, he’ll get a job again!
This, shall we say, is something of a stretch.
But first he has to NOT DRINK, and it’s hard.
He lasts about an hour, I’d say. Then he’s tempted. Then he pours it down the drain to the sound of DRAMATIC MUSIC.
Anyway, he’s on site for the hit, looking down from the roof where the whiskey sign stands, runs away, and falls through a window where there are hipsters banging on bongos and wailing on the licorice stick:
Beatniks gotta beat
Eventually our hero tracks down the guy who was supposed to be killed, and he wasn’t killed at all! Will there be a showdown that gives our hero the strength to never drink again?
No, he just gets drunk and the bad guy gets away, and as the credits roll he's heaving into the commode.
Just kidding. It's a fine enough movie, but it has that post Lost-Weekend mood of TREMENDOUS IMPORTANCE, because they are talking about alcoholism. And I suppose, at the time, it was.
That will do. The new year at the Bleat begins . . . and nothing has changed at Matchbooks, because I can't improve upon the design. Substack up around 11. Thank you for joining me for another year! And here we go.
