The first ordinary clear-brain day in a long time. Rose with purpose, pushed the coffee machine START button with the steely determination of someone launching the photon torpedos, and deconstruction the egg with brisk assurance, using the Chinese Automatic Whisk. You may think: did you not curse that thing twice already, because it leaked black oil into the eggs? Your memory is excellent. The first one spat oil, and I thought, well, we’ve all an incontinent moment, so I gave it a pass and bought another. It started leaking oil. But! While cleaning the storage closet I realized that I’d bought a twin pack, and here was the unused one! That was three weeks ago.

This morning it leaked oil. Twenty-one uses and it broke. We are definitely in “shame on me” territory here.

Manually scrambled the contents of another egg, and paused to
consider whether I should add sharp cheddar or mozzarella. My wife made an off-hand comment once when I prepared omelettes for guests and included mozzarella: not a real thing you put in eggs. Oh. Oh really. Talk to Perkins. Talk to the wise men who crafted the Valli menu. Of course it’s an ingredient! I spooned pico de Gallo over all. To the sausage I applied a ribbon of one of the hot sauces I got in the 12-month subscription my brother-in-law gave me for Christmas. I am, alas, tired of most of them. It is all I can do not to put this on everything. It is heavenly. Flavor, not pain.

Anyway. Thus fortified, I wrote a section of the August below-the-fold week 3 for 2026, then edited the substack, did the art, uploaded, walked the dog.

No, I am not leaving this place. How could I?

 

Went to the gym, and had the usual pang of conscience: for a week now there’s a little booth staffed with someone who wants to talk about an Issue - one about which I can do absolutely nothing, aside from handing over money. You get the pitch on the way in and you get called on the way out. Today it was “hey got a super-quick moment” to which you want to say “so we’ve agreed that a moment is an elastic interval that does not have set dimensions, like a second or a minute? Okay. That means a moment could be short or long, and if it’s the latter, the idea of a super-quick long time period does not tell me I’ll be done here soon. You feel guilty, because the act of not wanting to talk about something right now is somehow equated with not caring about the issue. It is okay if I just don’t particularly care as much as you would like right now?

I should just stop at the booth tomorrow and get it out of the way.

Then home, for an hour of power washing. This time it’s the driveway. It's a double, and more. I did the area where the garbage bins are located, and a grotesque slurry flowed down the drive. Looked like oil. Texas Tea. The bins don’t leak, so I don’t know what’s going on, but the end result was like the restored Sistine Chapel, driveway-wise, minus the timeless iconography and illustrative episodes of Christianity. I will do more this week and it will be sparkling.

Then a solid nap without dreams of any bothersome nature. Did webwork, made a dinner of garlic sausages with a garlic cream sauce, none of which was particularly garlicky. Salad with the only remaining dressing: hello, garlic vinaigrette. Should’ve finished it off with some garlic gelato.

Got the mail. We live in an era when you finally get around to seeing what's in the mailbox seven hours after it arrives, because it's a big who-cares. Ah: the mailman delivered a sheaf of letters from someone on another block. It’s interesting to see how people are on entirely different mailing lists than the ones pumping out the glossy sheafs to me. A different world of urgent concerns. Common to all, of course, is the idea that peril is nigh and money is needed. Not one of the mailings had anything to do with a domestic problem, save one, which was a general-interest cri de coeur about the need to raise money to fight. Fight!

No, I didn’t open them. That would be unthinkable. Can you imagine being someone who palpates the envelope for the contours of a credit card, and thinks “it’s my lucky day.” Of course, you couldn’t activate it. They know. They know.

By the way, am I the only one left on the planet who refuses to have store credit cards? I don’t care if I get 10% off. I just don’t like that bill hanging out there. I’m in the process of switching banks, and that means winding down the card I use for most purchases. Won’t cancel, but won’t use it much, and this is a relief because it is ugly. It is the stupidest looking card I’ve ever had. Looks like a luxury cigarette pack design from 1982. The only card I like is the Amex, because it’s classic. It looks like money.

Women always seem to have 15 cards from different stores, and it’s a nightmare if they lose their wallet. Imagine if you have usage alerts set to your phone, and all of a sudden there are transactions appearing at the rate of one every two seconds, from Malaysia. When my card was stolen in New York - a skimmer, most likely, in the train station, welcome to Gotham - my watch was drilling a hole in my wrist as the miscreant tried to buy ice cream and jewelry in Malaysia. What a world. Where’s your private orbital laser platforms when you need them? No, don’t kill him, throttle ‘er back, just singe the hell out of his hair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not about reviewing TV shows, I have to remind you. Also, occasionally it will be a review of a TV show. I prefer not to, since there are about 4,951 shows airing now. You find yourself engrossed in a drama, and run to reddit or elsewhere, and find a lot of people talking about it - but that’s a micron-thin slice of the TV demo.

Better to look way back to something that’s new to all of us, and see what we can learn. And that means another edition of Who's On What's My.

 

 

Here's a hint.

 

 

You can see it now, can't you? Imagine the responsibilities that come with having that face.

 

 

He was warmly received, I should note.

 

 

As you might now, he had an interesting life.

Winston gave his son a choice of Eton College or Harrow School, and he chose the former. Randolph later wrote "I was lazy and unsuccessful both at work and at games ... and was an unpopular boy". He was once said to have been given "six up" (i.e. a beating) by his house's Captain of Games (a senior boy) for being "bloody awful all round".

Michael Foot later wrote that this was "the kind of comprehensive verdict which others who had dealings with him were always searching for."

I just remember second-hand stories from WW2 histories about him being in debt and a general drain on his father.

In another episode:

 

 

It is, I think, a generational thing: you recognize him in his younger version right away, or you don't.

 

 

 

It’s 1988.

These are all from "Working Mothers" magazine. Keep that in mind.

Hmm. We're losing the plot. The hues of the mid-decade are losing to crap choices foisted on us just to be different. Did we want mustard? Nah.

 

 

There's no explanation for his hair or right arm, but everyone will think it's cool because he has a Van Gogh tie. But is that enough? Does it need something else?

Yes! A woman in the background performing a lion-taming act with an imaginary cat!

And for people who don't like to smoke, I'm sure there are other pool parlors!

Actually, no, there aren't.

 

 

The bony career woman / speed addict on the left has a bit of Jokermouth.

The slogan "And he drinks Johnny Walker" was used for many ads, but none that had this ad's peculiar combination of action and static pose.

 

 

 

Heh: "Always an asset."

If we could have Walkmans, why not pocket TVs that couldn't consistently bring in a signal, but did so now and then, and seemed more cool than useful?

 

 

I wanted one, but I suspect the reason I didn't have one was the price. No doubt unacceptable to modern tastes; the refresh rate was probably 1 frame per second.

Walkman: old! Discman: cool!

Also, skips like hell! But a pretty cool leap in tech.

 

 

I had one, and used it as my main CD player. Then came "9 1/2 Weeks," and we all saw the CD player with the tray that slid out on command, and that was the end of using dinky portable components. We all needed the tray that slid out on command in a stack of thin electronic devices.

Strange women lying in pools distributing car stereo equipment is no basis for governmental legitimacy

 

 

 

"Hey, who ripped off this note from my legal pad?"

 

 

So: was there any lower hard pack? No. No, there was not. No one was below 1 mg, I don't think.

Hell of an 80s pattern; seems a bit late for 88, but these things take time to trickle down.

 

 

 

That will do for today, except of course for the updates and the latest chapter in the Joe Ohio story, over at the paid section of the Substack. Thank you for your patronage, as always.