It finally happened: they broke the seal on King Sid’s Tomb, and the treasures have been pillaged. The door to Sid Hartman’s office have been closed since 2020, the chamber dark. Sid died in 2020, at the age of 100, and was still working for the paper at the time. I seem to remember there was a celebration that was curtailed or poorly attended because the lockdowns hit.
This was going in the recycling bin. I saved it for posterity.
When I was growing up, getting your tonsils removed was both common and mysterious. What are they? You didn’t know. Where were they? In your neck maybe? What did they do? No idea. Why did you have two? Don’t ask me, maybe it’s just that thing the body does where it has two of everything, like Noah’s Ark.
I don’t remember how old I was when they were removed, but I have a memory of the operation. They gave me something to put me out and wheeled me into a room, and the last thing I remembered was seeing an extraordinary collection of knives on the wall. Butcher knives. Meat cleavers. Swords and scimitars. A hallucination, of course, unless my folks decided to cut costs and have them out at Bob’s Cutlery on the South Side.
Afterwards, ice cream. This was the expected reward for being good and brave. That’s the memory: coming to, groping out of the fog, and immediately being served ice cream. Who knows if that’s true; I don’t think there was a nurse on duty at the end of the bed, waiting for me to stir, then running out of the room and shouting VANILLA TWO SCOOPS STAT.
Was it vanilla? I’m sure it was. The ice cream options in Fargo in the 60s seemed limited to vanilla, chocolate, and Neapolitan. Tubs of sherbet as well. Neapolitan was just a strange thing, as I’ve said before at tedious length. The chocolate was underwhelming (modern chocolate ice cream is an entirely different flavor, much richer, less better-living-through-chemistry quality) and the ice cream was studded with little fruit nodules. No thanks. But. Here’s the mystery.
Why did I think there were only three flavors, when the world of ice cream was far more diverse in the 50s?
It's the Royale version, which is even more enticing.
Here, have an entire quart, all at once:
Sealtest was popping out one after another in '58:
I mean, it looks like whipped asbestos, but it got the message across.
Outside of ice cream parlors, which no one calls them anymore, the options have narrowed. It seems as if there are dozens of flavors, but there aren’t. There are four or five brands that make the same narrow range. Something has caramel and sea salt, another has fudge ribbons, some have cookies or brownies, but it’s all a combination of these things, apportioned between chocolate and vanilla bases. The other day, tired of the usual weekend treat, I got some Peppermint Bark gelato from Lundsenbyerly’s, and it was delicious. It’s gone now. Last summer I found a limited edition Banana-flavor in a new high-end brand. It too is gone, never to return. Sorry you liked it! You can’t ever have it again.
You may wonder why the year is now in its third day, and everything here at the Bleat looks the same. Don't worry. Unnecessary new paradigm on Monday. I've been filling the hours this evening fixing the Motel section, the year pass to eliminate stubborn typos not noticed ten years ago, check busted links, and so on. When I upload a page in the annual update folder, I deposit a copy in the state folder, but that means the navigation links have to be changed. As long as I'm checking those, might as well troubleshoot the whole motel site, right?
Sometimes it seems as if this thing is just getting to be too much.
Well then stop, no one's forcing you
No. Can't. The internet needs fresh content, or it will wither and expire!
Kidding of course, but in a way, I am not. The internet needs fresh non-corporate non-chain non-institutional individual content.
Right?
I was in my house, in the kitchen, watching the newspaper's sports guy make French toast. He actually was taking frozen French toast and cooking it on a stove, in a pan, and trying to pass it off as fresh. I was talking about how I enjoyed the game because we made great second efforts and it was always nice to see a back-up quarterback start and have a chance to say that he threw the completed pass in the NFL.
I went outside and was reminded that we had several aggressive dead neighbors. at first they were rather comic but then they were sort of walking out of the house with blank faces holding knives intend on doing harm I realize it wasn't so much they wanted us, they were just annoyed at other people who were still alive. Somehow they managed to knock me down, which was almost comic, because they were such a milquetoast group of zombies, mild middle-aged suburban stereotypes, except they were dead and moving around.
A look at a particular period of life when this technological shift was not yet fully assimilated into the murder's plans.
We end our survey with a number that gave me more agita than I really need at the end of the week. At least it's a short and cheerful song, a perfect example of pre-rock happy anodyne pop:
Wikipedia says Jerry Wallace was an American country and pop singer, and has him releasing this tune in 1964. So why did the page where I found the song say he was Australian? Because the YouTube search pulled up the wrong guy for the second hit. Not Jerry Wallace, but Jimmy Hannan.
Almost identical.
Now we're done. Thanks for your visits this week! Substack up at 10 AM, for paid customers. Consider chipping in, won't you? It'll be going to five-times-a-week next year with no price increase. I know I said that last week but it's true!
