Behold above, the forbidden land! That's a nighttime view, when all the workers have gone home. It is private property, of course. Below, you see the entrance to the building. You also see a sign on the left, which is where I sometimes sit on the curb and consult a small cigar.

Well. Today someone from the building walked alllll the way from the red door to tell me that I cannot sit on the curb. I looked left and I looked right, and I said "really?" He said - quite nicely, mind you - that yes, I can't. He added, superfluously, that they have a smoking section, and all such puffing must be undertaken in the designated area.

Which is right by the building, mind you.

I said, well, okay, and I stood and moved behind the property line.

On that side I'm probably violating Fred regs. There will be another jobsworth out soon enough to upbraid me for that, I'm sure.

Hallway Weed Quotient this week: about 27%.

But! I would like to note an important achievement: finally, successful French Toast. I had intended to make it two weeks ago, only to find I had no pan in which to dip the bread. That's the problem with starting from scratch. A pan was secured at Target, and I anticipated good Sunday morning Pain Perdu. I wrecked the eggs, whisked, added some milk and the capful of vanilla extract, pulled down the bread from the shelf, and ai yi yi a sight only Alexander Fleming could love. The loaf was tainted from stem to stern with mold, and made me realize anew the annoyance of living alone: you never quite make it through a whole loaf, unless you freeze it. You can buy half a loaf, which, of course, is better than none. Anyway, I poured the mixture into a small container, purchased specifically for Life at the Fred, and discovered that the lid did not screw to the jar very well - or rather, discovered that when I put it in the fridge, it had not screwed tightly, for some mixture splashed out -

Because everything is 32% harder

Everything

I cleaned this up. Later that day I bought a half loaf, noting with a certain grim set of the jaw that it was not half the price of a full loaf. This morning I got out the electric skillet and the dipping pan, opened the fridge, and found that the mixture had leaked under the glass, so I had to take out the entire shelf and clean it. While the French Toast cooked I made a small omelette with the special sausage I had purchased at Kowalski's, a "Smoked Bacon Pork Breakfast Sausage" notable for an oddly unpalatable "smoked" flavor that had a metallic tang you rarely wish to encounter in anything you eat. Birch ate the rest of it and didn't complain.

The French Toast was delicious. The coffee was tepid, though, and I discovered that the brand-new Keurig K-Mini Mate was demanding descaling, after two weeks of use. Sigh. After the gym I bought some white vinegar and began the descaling process - after watching an 8 minute tutorial on YouTube - and I am now 16 cycles into the process and the light is still blinking.

Because everything is 32% harder

Everything

Well, let's see what our Dove Fortune is today.

Easy for you to say, Mr. Foil Wrapper.

Actually, that was yesterday, but I take the evening chocolate's exhortations as a guide for the day to come. It's a fine sentiment, but it does put the onus on a fellow. Isn't it enough that I have energy? Must it be rah-rah? Does going to the gym and not upbraiding anyone for singing count as good energy? Let's go see. Half an hour later I am looking askance at a fellow whose shoes are squeaking on the treadmill. I do not know how shoes can squeak so much, or so loudly. Ah well. GOOD ENERGY, remember. GOOD! ENERGY!

Let's go check the light to see if the machine is happy, and yes, I have cleaned the needle.

The light is still on.

Here is the fortune that will guide tomorrow:

We'll see.

Daughter was watching Half Man on HBO, and was on the fence about it. I decided to join her to see if I, too, was ambivalent. I'm not; it's horrible, but it's horribly compelling, except for the part about being consistently off-putting. The setting - miserable, damp, cloudy, unhappy Glasgow in the 80s - is interesting to me for many directions, if only to compare my college life in the Midwest with Uni, as they call it over there with their clever ways, in the UK. Makes you realize how easy you can pitch the audience back and get some undeserved nostalgia by playing New Order in the background. I did hear some Ian Dury, though. That surprised me. He wasn't much a singer but I recognized it straight away.

I'm not saying this is great, but it's very much of the time. Hand-made, if you will. I saw him when he toured with some other new-wave types. Sometimes I think I saw them all.

Anyway, I'm three eps in and will ride it out, but I find the writer-creator-actor person severly off-putting. I had the same reaction to his previous show, Baby Reindeer. The character plays in Half Men looks as if he smells horrible.

Unrelated: there's an ad that keeps playing on on Hulu, a 15 second spot for Fandango. The series of ads salutes various types of moviegoers. This one has annoyed me from the start, because it's such a steal from Williams' Jurassic Score. You hear it too, don't you? It's just a few notes, but it's the orchestration, the mood.

It’s 1990.

Sterling went for the class-act, but at a sensible price, because . . . wait a minute, didn’t they all cost the same? If not, wasn’t it just a matter of nickels or dimes?

The brand had limited success in the states, was later relaunched in Great Britain, and currently has almost half the market, says the internet. I doubt it.

So . . . I should pour my Evian on my salmon because nit’s dry?

Or, it's unimprovable in all ways, being perfect, so add the only thing that won't interfere with the flavor.

It is good water. I remember buying a bottle in a hot rail car on a high school Europe trip, and it was the best thing I'd ever had.

Poised between 80s and 90s, this one. This could’ve been the direction the decade took: more bright primary colors, simple classic images.

The shapes were starting to get baggy, but that was okay; things still looked stylish.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

I get it, I get it - it warms you up. But now I'm thinking the room is going to get slightly colder.

I'm also thinking that few in the audience had an actual fireplace, unless it was up at the Connecticut place.

Well, that would mean something else today, no?

It's an ad for Seventeen magazine, saying that this is a young woman, and should be regarded as such. And by "regarded" I mean "specifically targeted by clever advertising campaigns."

I didn’t know that Chock Full had an upscale brand extension.

If you’re curious:

Its unusual name derives from the 18 nut shops that founder William Black (c. 1902 – 1983) established with the brand in the city beginning in 1926. When the Great Depression struck, he converted them to lunch counters, serving a cup of coffee and a sandwich for five cents.

I used to drink it, but it wasn’t anything special, really.

Consistent branding in all their campaigns: the constant blue, the artistic images.

Are they smoking, though? Where's the cigarette?

She's leaning up against it.

A reminder of how narrow and bigoted and blinded the culture used to be. It was so conservative and blinkered before everyone was liberated around 2014 or something

It's New York Magazine, granted, but it was sold everywhere. Even Fargo.

That will do! See you around.