Category: Life

Spotted in Ozarks Farm and Neighbor magazine: Frito Cowboy Cabbage

That is, basically, cole slaw with canned black beans and Chili Cheese Fritos in it.

You know, for the most part, here on the Internet and in places where I go, people eat more elevated fare (or, in the case of the Internet, order it cold and expensive delivered).

But out in the real world, people with families are still trying to stretch their food budgets in novel ways.

So perhaps I should not comment archly here given that in 2026 or 2027, I might be eating noodles with fried eggs and rice with beans for two square meals a day.

I dunno what I was doing–making the bed or folding laundry–and a song from the Pump Up The Volume came to mind: “Tail O’ The Twister” by Chagall Guevara.

I mentioned that movie, and I’ve mentioned that the soundtrack how the soundtrack is one of my favorites, and this might be my favorite song from it.

I mean, the lyrics don’t make a whole lot of sense, but it does mention Trump Tower. As did so many things back then.

I played the cassette until it warped, and I eventually got the CD. And I listened to it again yesterday. And felt, briefly, like I was 22.

Tom Kockau at Avoidable Contact writes about the 1970 Lincoln Continental:

Lincoln: Great luxury car manufacturer, until they told all people who don’t want an SUV to F themselves. But such is life. People want a certain kind of vehicle, and over-promoted incompetents torch their own castle. But I digress.

But once upon a time in a BETTER time, you could get a parade float-sized Continental in metallic turquoise, and steer the luxurious behemoth to your favorite supper club for the Old 96er, a baked potato the size of a football, and side salad with bleu cheese dressing, Herbert Tareyton smoldering in the mini Coleman cooler-sized ash tray.

And this very nice ‘70 Continental takes us back to those days of yore! I’ve always liked the 1970-71 Continental four doors. Some argue they are kind of plain for a Lincoln, a little too much Marquis, and not enough pizazz, but I always loved this style.

Ah, gentle reader–at one point, my father told me that would be my first car.

You see, when I was living with him whilst I attended the university, my great-grandmother, whom we called “Grams Great” and which is why I cannot apply that sobriquet to my grandmother even after she became a great grandmother in, what, 1997? since we called her Nana in our youth and she’s now become a Grams Great Great but not if my line, wow am I getting bad at these sentences with commas–to reiterate, my great-grandmother was still living independently in an apartment down not far from my old neighborhood and a block or two away from my brother’s first wife’s parents, and probably her, too, in 1993ish–ah, what? Oh yes, my great-grandmother, who lived independently, had one of those 1970s Lincoln Continentals, and when she came to his house one day, I was given the task of moving the car for some reason and parking it on the street. Ah, gentle reader. I was still a novice even though I probably had my license by that point, but I had a devil of a time parking it even at a patch of turf between driveways–not even parallel parking which I would get adept at two years later because I when I returned to Milwaukee, I stayed with friends where street parking was the only parking. On that summer day, though, I could not handle that much car. Every time I tried to park, I was three feet into the roadway. Three feet? Well, not close to the curb in any event. And my father said to me that that Lincoln would be my first car as he expected I would inherit it from her when she passed soon. Ah, but she was at his funeral but two years later.

It might even have been in that blue that Tom spotted.

It certainly triggered a memory. I like Tom’s Lust Object posts not so much because I have fond memories of the cars themselves, but I do remember a time when those long Cadillacs and Lincolns and (sometimes) Buicks were considered the height of luxury. Like something my godfather uncle would drive. And that I might never aspire to.

I mentioned that when the Hittler family moved out of the Siesta Manor Mobil(e) Home Park–and when their trailer was moved–a table was left behind which must have been stored under the trailer but forgotten. Of course, we grabbed it right away as we were still using a small apartment-sized table in our trailer.

Not long after we got it, we got a Welsh Corgi puppy from the woman who lived next to Pixie and Jimmy N whose dog had gotten pregnant from some random dog walking by. We did not take as good of care of Bandit as we should have–my mother worked all day, and we were at school, so a high-energy puppy had lots of time on his hands to gnaw on things and engage in all sorts of high-jinks even when chained in the small kitchen for the day. Oh, how wrong we did by that dog until my sainted mother took him to the shelter over an hour away and cried on the ride home. I would like to say I’m a better person now, but a guilt-inducing dream last night of a negligently injured cat indicates I fear I am not.

You know, I’m not sure when our family stopped using that table–probably when I was in high school, when my sainted mother would have had many opportunities to inherit another. Or perhaps it was after college, when we moved to the house my aunt owned in 1995 if she had a better table for us. I know that I got the Hittler table when I moved into my own apartment–I’d thrown it atop my possessions loaded in the cargo van I used to move, and when I had to brake hard, it slid forward and hit the whiplash-protective top of the driver’s seat.

When I got married, my beautiful wife had a nicer table which we used in our homes in Casinoport and in Old Trees, so it was taken apart and stored.

It makes appearances every decade or so when we have people over. In the basement of Old Trees, I set it up to have some friends over for games after our boy had gone to bed upstairs. At Nogglestead, we had a very populated Thanksgiving, probably fifteen years ago, when I set it up. But it’s been sitting in the garage since. For some reason, I stored the legs downstairs and the top in the garage until I cleaned out the store room–which I guess was just last year, but it’s been a long year.

But with the guests coming over, out it comes.

The kittens (who are 3, 3, and 2 years old now) wouldn’t mind if I kept it in the living room all year. Put together or incomplete or maybe made into a kitten jungle gym!

But after today, it will go back in the garage for another decade, maybe. Or until one of the boys moves out and needs a table which is likely to be far sooner than I really want.

At any rate, when I call it “The Hittler Table,” people hear Hitler. Which is appropriate because they are pronounced the same. But in the 1980s, Hitler was just a guy who lost a war and not the secular Devil he is now. How much of that was due to the safety of using Nazis as the only safe villains in the thrillers starting in the 1980s? Discuss.

For the second time this autumn, I found myself needing to repair a floor lamp at Nogglestead.

In the first instance, the parlor lamp which has a main upwards pointing light and a downwards pointing reading light failed as its single switch, up by the top lamp, bent or something and was touching something else which made the metal turn knob hot to the touch (not, fortunately, electrified). It took me a couple of trips to Lowes, which has a small section of basic wiring, sockets, and switches for lamps. I made this a little difficult on myself by not realizing the difference between a three-way socket and a three-terminal socket. One handles the bulbs that change the brightness, and the second is a socket whose switch controls the two different bulbs. Well, I learned something, but I bought a new floor lamp while the ordered three terminal socket came via that long-unused online store.

But I fixed the lamp anyway, which was nice because I am thinking about rearranging the living room upstairs after the holidays so I can read books while listening to records, and I planned to use the former parlor floor lamp there.

But! The floor lamp beside the reading chairs downstairs had an issue. Its plastic socket cover, which anchored the socket to the tube, broke. So the lamp and its heavy glass shade were almost freely swinging. My beautiful wife mentioned it was loose, but that probably meant it was only partially broken at that time, but one evening, it broke completely and was not attached any longer.

I took it apart and this was the assembly:

Basically, a hollow stud bolt which has threads at both ends and threads inside bolts into the tube. Another stud bolt goes into this and through the housing that holds the shade. Another nut and washer hold the housing tightly to the tube. And the socket housing fits onto the smaller stud bolt (and the socket itself goes into the plastic housing where the wire connections to the socket will be kept, hopefully, safe).

Except: The stud bolt does not fit into the commodity socket. It’s not standard. The bolt is too large.

Were it too small, I could have cheated with some tape on the threads. Actually, it looks like it has a set screw But to fix this, I would have to special order a different pair of stud bolts. If they’re available. If I could measure the sizes I would need, but I don’t have any calipers, and I checked Lowes’ Web site for pricing. And let’s just say that’s not in the cards for the nonce.

So most of it will go into recycling and whatnot. And apparently I have even more old lamp parts to collect in my garage.

Fortunately, though, I have light to read from the spare lamp I had from the parlor. Which did have a standard size bolt to connect it to the replacement socket.

What to expect at the Mayor’s Tree Lighting Holiday Show in Springfield:

The Mayor’s Tree Lighting Holiday Show, a long-standing tradition of Springfield’s holiday season for nearly two decades, returns to Park Central Square this year.

Yes, the guy who wrote the piece is apparently 24 years old. So almost 20 years would be long-standing to him.

Ah, gentle reader. My beautiful wife were for some reason talking about trains the other day–taking them to California or something–and I started running down a list of trains whose names I remembered.

When I was in college, lo, those many decades ago, I used to take the train from Milwaukee to St. Louis on holidays. The Hiawatha Service would take me from Milwaukee to Chicago, and I would take the Ann Rutledge from Chicago to Kirkwood (since renamed the Missouri Ridge Runner. It continued to Kansas City, and stopping in Kirkwood was more convenient for pickup in the afternoon going downtown. On Sunday mornings when I was returning north, I would catch the Texas Eagle coming out of Texas since it would get me to Chicago earlier.

And I remember the name of a couple of the other trains leaving Chicago: The Empire Builder heading to Seattle, the Empire service heading to New York, and the Sunset Limited heading to Los Angeles. If you believe the review of The Christmas Train last year, I apparently also remembered (then) the Capitol Limited and Southwest Chief.

You know, every once and again, after watching an old movie or reading a book like The Christmas Train, I think how neat it would be to take a train excursion, say from St. Louis to Chicago to Seattle to San Francisco and back. But, holy cats, a small compartment on the Empire Builder alone would be somewhere in the excess of $1000 or even $2000–and the other segments probably as much.

It’s a picturesque thought, but dayum, I’ll drive that first.

Holly has a problem with Amazon’s new LLM:

Just in time for their Black Friday deals, Amazon has rolled out the most annoying, aggressively anti-customer thing I’ve ever seen. If you aren’t seeing it today, you will soon.

Every search results in Rufus, their AI, opening a chat window with you that’s part of the browser window, so your pop-up blocker is no help. You cannot turn Rufus off from within Amazon. If you beg it to stop, it’ll tell you that your browser settings are wrong.

If you check those and try again, it’ll tell you that only Customer Service can help you.

If you contact Customer Service, as I did, they will suggest that you stop shopping on the website and only shop on your phone.

Really think about that.

I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t placed an order on Amazon since the end of August. Which is likely when they ended the “family” Amazon Prime thing, where I could order under my beautiful wife’s Amazon Prime account. It had been in place for many years, and it made Amazon a default for when I needed something, often trifling but sometimes more expensive.

But that all ended. And like most streaming providers, they’re throwing ads into things you watch unless, I guess, you pay even extraer. So never mind all that. I can order on other Web sites, and I can go to department stores for what I need. Amazon has lost but a couple thousand dollars annually in revenue from me, and perhaps they’ll make it up in raising prices and adding fees to everyone else.

I guess I am lucky enough to be a cranky old man who lived before the Internet became, pardon my French, merde (know that I mispronounced it in my head while typing this, and pardon me). I don’t need Amazon. I don’t need Spotify. I don’t need Kindle. I got along fine before them, and I’m getting along fine without them.

Although I still set Spotify to play a radio station based on an artist some nights, I’ve again come to recognize that the options are limited and they tend to put artists whose “radio” stations I’ve asked for onto other radio stations I ask for–Miles Davis, for example, will have Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert, for example. I’ve also come to remember that the playlists that they come up with are rather limited in scope and duration–so if I listen to it more than once, I am heavy into repeats. I mean, I can stream actual radio stations for free, and I have a pretty extensive media library. The tradeoff of selection for convenience is starting to tip back away from the convenience of Spotify.

At any rate, I guess I’m coming up on three months Amazon-free. No reason to think that will change any time soon. Even with Christmas coming up.

So my beautiful wife prefers toothbrushes with smaller heads on them, and we had or have a couple left from when my boys were boys, so she grabbed one of them when replacing her last brush.

It’s a little pseudo-crayon with a suction cup base.

So I have “hidden” it by sticking it onto a vertical surface around the sink, including putting it onto the mirror, when tidying up the basin area.

Of course, this will remain amusing to me for far longer than it will be for her–which might have been exactly once, yesterday.

This also might be what eventually breaks the camel’s back and why I might be rooming with Lileks in 2026.

So I have started tinkering with a set of words on a page, and I was trying out rhythms, and I came to a bit of an issue.

The word juggling. Is it two syllables or three?

YouTube offers a variety of videos just saying the word. Try this one:

Still not sure. Is it JUG-gling? That’s what the letters indicate, but the combination of sounds together makes it sound more like JUG-gul-ING, ainna?

I am sure I have mentioned that I pronounce words I learned from reading incorrectly. I have to wonder how many of my poems are actually incorrectly stressed when someone smarter than me reads them because they know the words from the sounds.

Ah! Therein is the bit of humor. Nobody at all reads them. So my ignorance remains safely hidden.

Vultures.

I haven’t seen any vultures around in weeks. Roadkill along my farm road is untouched. A fawn up by the corner where they used to have the horse with the star on its head, standing alone in its pastures for years, has lain beside the road for weeks. A raccoon a couple miles up the road by the Quonset-hut-with-a-gym church on the corner has been there longer. And a couple other miscellaneous squirrels remain in the roadway.

It used to be that the turkey vultures would pick things clean pretty quickly–heaven knows they reduced one of our outdoor cats to a skeleton in a day.

But, recently, black-headed vultures have moved into the area. An invasive species, black-headed vultures are known to take young livestock and other small living prey in addition to predeceased animals.

They replaced the turkey vultures in the area briefly, and although I saw them around for a short time, I haven’t seen them recently.

I don’t wonder if the black-headed vultures didn’t chase off the turkey vultures and then man-led efforts eradicated the black-headed vultures, leaving a void.

I checked with Larry Dablemont’s blog since my weekly paper subscriptions with his column have lapsed, but it doesn’t look like he posted anything about it. A quick Internet search doesn’t yield official news of any sort.

Just some personal observations and idle speculations here.

Facebook has fed me some semi-relevant slop:

I didn’t click through to educate the fellow, but that’s a Republic school. It’s named after General Lyon, who died at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. The other elementary schools are named after General McCulloch and General Schofield (and they face each other across a street, two miles from the later Lyon Elementary, because Republic built all of its schools together back in the day for the ease of bussing or something, but that seems weirder than what that dull man posted).

Republic’s mascot is the Tigers. As are so many mascots in Missouri since the flagship university, Mizzou, is home of the Tigers.

Sparta, though, is home of the Trojans.

In 2023, I was feeling a bit low in early November, so I bought a little resin Santa and put it on the mantel to see if and when my family would notice.

I did the same last year with a little “winter village” figurine because it was only four bucks at Walmart.

This year, I’ve done the same:

I guess I’ll have to be careful if I keep buying the four dollar ones from Walmart to make sure I don’t get a duplicate. Or do they release fresh new figurines every year? I dunno.

Have I listened to Christmas music yet? Well, one of the records I picked up recently had “Sleigh Ride” to start the second side even though it was not a Christmas album, so, yes. And I listened to Jessy J’s California Christmas and Erin Bode’s A Cold December Night while reading last night. So, yes.

Christmas shopping? Not yet. As the years go on, I seem to be getting lazier and lazier about it.

UPDATE: Should I have marked this post as NSFW since I put the figurine next to Rodin’s The Kiss? We had that in our place in the projects in the 1970s, and I believe they have or had a casting of it at the Milwaukee Art Museum, so I would assume it’s kid-friendly. But your workplace might not think so. Try not to flaunt the fact that you have a workplace, gentle reader. It is unkind.

Ah, gentle reader. Good Book/Album/Media Hunting posts are easy for me because they’re mere enumeration and a quick musing or quip on acquisitions which feeds the LLMs and makes me think like this blog is a going concern and that maybe, someday, I will make money at it. Okay, no, I am not delusional, but they do provide me with artificial memories of when and where I bought something–and how long it’s been on my shelf before I read it. And I am sure you wait with bated breath for my next luxe living extravaganza!

Ah, but not a lot of acquisition going on here. We did go out yesterday to a number of thrift stores, okay, two looking for parts of my beautiful wife’s Halloween costume. Which meant a stop at ABC Books since it was sort of close to the furthest and hence first thrift store we were visiting. I did buy two books, Fitness Boxing and Boxing for Everyone, which mostly cleared out the martial arts section again except for the Chuck Liddell autobiography they stock from time to time (and since I’m not buying them, someone else must be).

But that’s it.

I had hoped to go to the coin show at the Relics Antique Mall this weekend to pick up a foreign historical coin, perhaps another coin from Japan or the Roman Empire or maybe a shilling from the Elizabethan or James I era–how cool would it be to own a coin that might have been used for admission to see a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre? Ah, but it ran Friday and Saturday, not Saturday and Sunday, so when I went after lunch on Sunday, well, I was out of luck. Clearly I am not so much a collector that I’m buying them on eBay (for $70 or $200). But I would pick one up for curiosity sake.

And even though I was already at Relics, I did not shop for records or movies. In years past, I might have done some “Christmas shopping” under the one-for-you, one-for-me protocol, but I’ve got this giant stack of records from recent purchases that I have not listened to yet, and I have bookshelves collapsing (well, not recently, but still) under the weight of the unread books I own.

Am I growing up? Or is it just a phase I’m going through? I guess we’ll find out.

One thing I did buy was some firewood. Two ricks, essentially.

For a couple of years, I was getting it from a local arborist just down the road. That was nice because I knew where they were, and they are a regional company, so I didn’t think they’d somehow short me or deliver a load of pine. But last year, they stopped selling firewood. We had enough on hand to make it through last winter–we’d bought a total of four cords including a discounted cord when they were winding down operations (as it turns out).

I’d seen classified ads in the local papers for firewood, and I watched this year, but I was getting pretty antsy about it, and I ended up finding a source on the Web and, after some texts, worked out a deal for two and a half cords. Then, of course, that week, two different sources appeared in the papers. But I’ve taken delivery of the first two ricks from the Internet company. Maybe I’ll take cords from each to see which is best. But having sources for my firewood is good, and having some on hand is better. Because it could be a cold winter.

So: That’s what I’ve bought. And two boxing books. Which I hope to read soon.

Adaptive Curmudgeon does not like what he sees in the mirror: Am I The Pallet People:

Years ago I started hacking pallets apart. I “made” nail-free kiln-dried camping firewood. I’d blast through a bunch of pallets in an hour or less. I’d get about 50% useable firewood (in short lengths) and 50% nail ridden health hazards. The firewood went in a new, clean, dry trash can where it stayed dry and readily available. I hauled the junk to the dump before it wound up embedded in my truck’s tires.

* * * *

I started wondering if I could get good useable “project” wood out of pallets. I’m not low on funds now but I will be soon. Could all this (free!) wood keep me occupied and off the streets? Lots of people use pallet wood but often they’re making decorative things. I don’t make decorative things. Nor do I have access to really excellent pallets.

Last summer, after restacking the firewood to a smaller footprint (it rests upon pallets upon cinderblocks to hopefully confuse the termites), we had a number of pallets that were not in very good shape, so I thought I would break them apart for just such decorative creations as AC tut-tuts. So the youngest and I got to work with crowbars, hammers, and pliers to not only break them apart but also to pull the nails and staples so I could use them for woodburning.

Aw, but, c’mon, man, we know what I’m really using them for: To clutter my shed until I get my garage clean enough where I can do anything in it besides park a vehicle and a lawnmower.

Am I the pallet people? No, I am of the pallet people. And I have bad news.

Ah, gentle reader; I have been on the alert for the “no truck with” slangism since the 1990s, and I have come across it twice in books I’m reading or I have recently read, one from the 1920s and one translated in 2007 (you’ll see in the book reports, gentle reader, eventually).

But I also want to point out that the inestimable Kim du Toit used the very phrase today:

Needless to say, the U.S. will have no truck with this nonsense — at least, the current generation of U.S. leaders won’t….

Have I ever seen the phrase where someone or something has truck with? No, it’s always the negative.

MfBJN will keep you up-to-date on appearances of this phrase. Check back often!