MASTERPIECE BY LIU ZIFENG

A scholar and artist in Liaoning recently posted a picture of a recent work of art on Facebook. It is stellar. I have never met him, and the likelyhood of ever doing so is unfortunately slim. But I appreciate his skill, and the aesthetic reflected in his pictures.

So I wish to show it here.

Kudos.




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TWO STEPS AT A TIME

An article on the internet mentioned a seven floor walk up apartment. Which automatically got me thinking oh good lordie no. Although given that I live on the second floor, up one set of stairs, and regularly traverse that when I need to go out for groceries, pipe smoking, mail call, laundry, what have you, and self-delusionally regard myself as a young man (hah!), that doesn't seem bad. The average temperatures in the place where that seven floor walk up is located are in the eighties Fahrenheit (around thirty Celsius).
I quail at anything over mid-seventies.
Legs won't function.


By the way: the Fahrenheit scale was invented by a long-time resident of Amsterdam. Which adds lustre to a city long known for free-thinking, eccentricity, and psycho-active drugs. And surely you can see why? Also, Amsterdam buildings are known for having brutal staircases.


In my actual youth, I'd take those stairs two at a time, at speed. Even when I was living four up. Hop hop hop ooh vimful vigour! Now, after a day at the salt mines, I'm slower. I like to be the stairs, feel the stairs, become one with the stairs, dig the groovy gestalt of the stairs.

Seven floors of them would be a bitch.

A further by the way: recently I've been getting spam calls concerning my "end of life financial planning". Based on being on a list of presumably old farts on the cusp of shuffling off. Gee thanks, bitches. At the end of my life I wish to be lowered from a strong hook at the apex of the building, front side, like they have in Amsterdam, which is there so that moving furniture in and out, considering the narrowness and steepness of their stairs, can be expeditely done.
It strikes me that a coffin or a brancard, even an entire hospital bed, fully loaded, may be thus lifted with minimal wear and tear on the joints of the people tasked with doing so.
At least without dinging the plaster. Life means concern for plaster. Or it should be.
Perfect plaster is a sign of civilization.

Oh, and I also wish to have an onion tied to my belt.
Like grampa Abe Simpson. It's the style.

Seven floors. Heavens.



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BRAINS ON FIRE

There's always a crowd at some places around dinner time. Which in this case was actually a very late lunch. Dumplings and hot sauce, hot milk tea. A generous tip because they didn't even attempt to seat me at a small table and I like the people who work there. Bright, young, efficient. In addition to dumplings they also do electric hued dishes that visiting New Yorkers and Midwesterners would like, but three of the nearby tables were Mandarin-speaking, and had ordered real food, so I couldn't identify any steaming plates with reds and greens.
Not that I wanted to. Probably sweet and sour this, gung pao that.
Plus the general. Always the general.

A long dawdle with my pipe and some fine tobacco afterwards in the darkness beyond the edge of the square, far from the crazy man screaming and the card players clustered in the light. From a distance I could tell that they were smoking. Smoking! That's illegal in San Francisco city parks. Was I the only incorrigible obeying the law?

Unlike them, I hesitate to risk a fine. I would be far less believable if I tried glib-talking my way out of trouble. 冇意思，我唔識講英文，唔知你講乜嘢，阿sir。"I'm sorry, I don't speak English, I don't know what you're saying, officer" ('mou yi si, ngo m sik gong ying man, ngo m ji nei gong mat ye, ah-sir'). Your honour, the accused swore at us in some goofy European gobbledygook when we cited him for smoking. So we gave him a citation for that, too.

And we're convinced that he sik gong ying man very well.

Yesterday it had been the vocalizing man on Waverly, this evening howling outrage from the street person collective near the pedestrian walkway. This city, in some areas, just cannot be quiet. For peace you need to walk up hill two or three blocks. And there are always people who see the pipe and think you have a spare cigarette, after all, you're not smoking it.

And actually, I did have a pack on me; a lovely luxury product that cost one third of the price of regulars. 五葉神香煙。 Support your local circumlegal businesses.

Didn't we make that point once in Boston Harbour?
And what would whiskey be without it?
Tradition!


That, in essence, is what we will be celebrating two days hence. Despite turkeys being actually very much like puppies, feathered puppies, capable of love and affection, and the severely discounted merchandise at the big box representing corporate greed and shoddy production standards because none of those people fighting each other for the very last electronic nostril twiddler have any self-control or standards.

If you used the fingers of your opposite hands to jank the hairs, which gives you a better angle, you wouldn't need the fancy device. Just like the depression boy, when we did it entirely by hand. And during the war! Self-reliance!

I watched the rats in the bushes struggle over a spent fast-food wrapper. I imagine the victor happily sounding like captain Jack Sparrow boasting "I've got a greasy paper, I've got a greasy paper" before losing it to some other rat.
Little swaggering rodents.


We need to return to simpler times, when America's consumer whores fought each other over jars of dirt and greasy papers. Not nostril twiddlers. Values, man, a return to values!


Like many pipe smokers, I contemplate the deeper things.
We're nature's intellectuals, tell you what.



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A SPLENDID HOLIDAY IDEA

Back in the old days Ronald Reagan advertised Chesterfields, especially at Christmas time. The carton came with festive printing AND a handy to-from card. All of your friends, young and old, of every possible gender, needed a carton of America's finest cigarettes!

Doctors, of course, disagreed. More doctors smoked Camels than any other cigarette! In a repeated survey, doctors all across the country, in all branches of medicine, were asked "what cigarette do you smoke, doctor?" And, not surprisingly, more doctors preferred the smooth rich taste of Camels.

Santa himself often smoked Murad Cigarettes, the Metropolitan Standard, made with the finest Turkish tobacco. That product does not exist anymore, and Santa probably didn't survive the hippie era either. It's sad.


Still, what would the holidays be without fine tobacco? Perhaps it's time to revive an old tradition: the entire family sitting in front of the fire after dinner happily puffing away. Who cares that the heater in the garage is on the fritz, we're smoking inside this year! No need to send uncle Gunther out into the cold -- invite the old bugger inside where he belongs!
Let us all enjoy his sparkling grouchy wit.

PRINT ADVERTISEMENT CIRCA 1932

Those lovely Willem II figurados, what in Dutch we call a 'bolknak', are no longer available. In the late nineties the splendid office building on the Eindhovensche Weg was demolished, and the beloved brand sadly disappeared. The other main cigar factory in Valkenswaard, Hofnar NV, closed down in 1990. The era when fine cigars paved roads, provided running water and electricity, fuel for central heating, funds for schools, hopitals, and lodgements for the elderly, had come to an end.

PRINT ADVERTISEMENT FROM 1938

It's cold outside. Let the old bastards in, you horrible puritans.
There are icicles on the edges of the compost heap.
A parade of frozen forest creatures.
Dead cats and dogs.



Note: both images from the Facebook page 'Valkeswird'.



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HOURS WELL-SPENT

Young adulthood was not a particularly good period. Life has gotten better. And my choices, while more limited by age, are often more sensible and balanced than then. Especially as regards aesthetics, oh lordy yes. When it comes to clothing it's no longer Sears Roebucks finest, and there is a complete absence of tie-dye, bellbottoms, and corduroy. Books? More mature tastes than then. Some authors whom back then I thought were the cat's pajamas, are not in my shelves in any great number now, and some not at all.

Should have kept all my science textbooks, though.
And bought more art books. Definitely.

One thing to which really wish I still had access is the multi-volume hard sciences and engineering encyclopedia my father kept in the small room behind the upstairs living room.
I had hours of fun with that. He probably acquired it when he was still in college, and had probably had hours of fun with it too.

A term which came unbidden into my head early this morning, seemingly at random, no discernible reason whatsoever, was paramecium. Paramecia are single celled organisms often found in still waters, which are microscopically covered with fuzz. Related terms, historically, are the words cillia (the fuzzy bits), animalcule (microscopic beastie), pellicle (a thin membrane or cell-lining), and Dutch scientist from the Golden Age (roughly 1588 to 1672) Christiaan Huyghens (1629 to 1695), Lord of Zeelhem (Haelen), which is approximately forty five miles southwest of where I grew up.

Minor boasting: We Dutch discovered tiny fuzzy bits!

Yay, fuzzy bits!

Of course I'm still unclear why or how an aeronautical engineer from Southern California ended up working for Philips Electronics. It's quite a mystery. Where they developing something there we just don't know about?

Most of his department were mushmouthed Englishmen and Scots, Dutch engineers who were convinced that an American could neither speak nor write decent English, and several graduates of the Technische Hoogeschool in Bandoeng (now named the 'Institut Teknologi Bandung'; Bandung Institute of Technology). Who as semi-native speakers of Sundanese, Colonial era Malay and Indonesian, Dutch, German, and English, had no opinion on the matter of language. Tak apa apa semua mungkin punya.


Also the cookbooks too. I really miss those cookbooks.
I've always been kind of a food slut.
Crêpes Suzette!
Mmm.



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A VERY BIG SLICE OF CAKE

Sometimes I get the idea that I'm actually a rather likable old coot. That, certainly, is the reaction I got from four twenty-sometings recently -- three men and one woman, plus a middleaged pipesmoker, as well as three Chinese women of various ages. One Toisanese, one Hong Kong, one from Shanghai. But I do not understand why this is.
Perhaps mature Dutch Americans are a thing.
Which is utterly baffling.

Maybe it's my aura. Which is golden and rather cheese-like.
Or my manly aroma of aged Virginia pipe tobacco.
With a hint of something naughty.
That being Perique.


In any case, the waitress from whom I requested 柱侯牛腩飯 ('chü hau ngau naam fan') and a cup of hot milk tea was bowled over by my ordering it in her language. I'll grant you that's a bit unusual, because white guys being able to sound like an office worker on Mody Road aren't, strictly speaking, standard away from Kowloon.

I know how she feels.
Boy howdy.

When I got home, my apartment mate, a woman of pure Cantonese ancestry who lives in the other bedroom, was happily singing vaudeville stripper tunes while fixing herself a snackipoo, plus a wedge of chocolate banana cake and a big glass of milk. Women, very often, tend to shy away from high fat and cholesterol stuff. If they're of East Asian genetic stock they also usually have a measure of lactose intolerance. And most women haven't a clue what ecdysiastics are and do, or what songs are natural to the field.

She also does show tunes. Happily and horribly.
Do not ask about Valley Of The Dolls.
Good Gouda almighty!

[By the way: There is no Book of Ecdysiastes in the Bible. Perhaps there should be.]

Sweet little Asian flower, quiet and shy? Hoohah! Yeah, that is not the case. Yes, she is of delicate build. Fine boned, not tall. In a previous life she was probably a grave robber or a gangster queen dealing ferociously with opponents. Of course when I threatened to inform her Teddy Bear (oldest friend in the world) about the unseemly singing, she blanched.
There are some proprieties which must eternally be maintained.
Ms Bruin still thinks she's sweet and innocent.

I dread the day she discovers karaoke.

The world ain't ready for that.


She isn't, strictly speaking, standard.



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MONDAY: LAUNDRY POSTPONEMENT

There were high hopes for today. What I had planned was laundry (highly necessary I assure you), visit my bank, and number of tasks around the house. Instead, I frittered away valuable time. No laundry. So I think I will stink a bit. Oh well, wasn't planning to meet anyone anyway. And I'm sure I can find something clean to wear. After I've had lunch I will light up a pipe and most fastidious people will avoid me anyhow.

Cleanish. Not precisely "clean" clean.

I don't feel like being virtuous.


This more or less repeats the pattern of most first days off every week. Then I get more and more anxious the nearer the end of my weekend becomes, finally panicking on the last day, getting off my duff and shlepping a bag of grubbies uphill, and at the laundromat wondering why the devil I didn't think of this before it's not so bad after all. Sometimes I actually do it ahead of that day and feel saintly and efficient for a while.


On Wednesdays, because the chachanteng to which I like to go closes after lunch, I usually don't do laundry. I have, in my adutlhood, found new and improved ways to procrastinate.
Like all efficient and intelligent people.

All advances in human civilization are the result of improvements in procrastinatory arts and sciences. Do something better, and consequently need to expend less time and effort.

Don't ask about non-human civilization. As yet we don't know about those.
Perhaps they're like insect hives with tonnes of mindless activity.
Ever-more old-fashioned drone tasks and rote busy work.
Striving for the ultimate in mind-numbing.
Alien space gulags.


If so, they'll never discover us or make contact.
There would be no percentage in that.
My heavens I'm good.



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THE LEGS, THE LEGS!

One of the most irritating things for someone who putzes with graphic programmes is to finish something, post it on his or her social media, then look it up in Google Images and discover that AI authoritatively identifies the work as a painting by someone one has never even heard of. "This is a gouache painting by noted artist Stephanie Zingbats, part of the Podunk Museum collection, gifted by Walther and Laura Derhooptie in 1997".

Part of the search results show other gouaches by Stephanie, as well as things that look even less likely. Yeah, okay, go hump yourself Google Images and AI. You're quite bonkers. This painting does not look anything like that. Four hues are identical. And on that basis.
As I said, very irritating. Especially as I have never even been near Podunk.
Who the heck are any of these people?!?


As it turns out, several of my recent works posted here are identical to, or very much like, in the style of, or derivative. Famous obscure geniuses of note. Whom no one has ever heard of, deservedly, in certain styles.

Utilizing light and depth for atmosphere or something.

I paint what I see, child.

EXISTENTIAL ANGST, ANGULAR BEEFSTEAK

The picture above, made using the paint programme on my computer, photorealisticly represents a rectangular beefsteak hippity-hopping with gay abandon across the great American prairie on Nob Hill right outside my garret window. Okay? Nothing else.
I saw it precisely so while outside smoking my pipe.


Now, according to Google Images (quote):

"The work is likely by artist William Stanisich, who is known for his watercolors of natural scenes such as Land's End and Yosemite, focusing on specific light and idiosyncratic forms.

The artist often paints close-up views of nature, under the canopy, creating ambiguities of scale.

The painting captures a dynamic interplay between light and shadow, suggesting a natural environment like a rushing stream or dense foliage."
[End cite]

That's certainly something. I'm sure you're right. Idiot.

Google Images additionally posted a link to ARTIST STATEMENT: Why a signature style? by William Stanisich, which is too long for me to casually read right now. But I'm sure it's very well-thought out and deeply felt, so I endorse it wholeheartedly. Wholeheartedly!


I am currently smoking flake in a Charatan from the pre-Lane period. Delicious. The legs in the title of this post refer to the meaty, meaty thighs so delightfully put down on canvas by Edgar Degas over a century ago in Paris as well as my own pedal appendages, which, having been on my feet all weekend, are making me rethink life, the universe, and everything. Particularly the right one. Which is possessed of an evil spirit.


Yesterday evening while taking public transit back to San Francisco after work it struck me, seeing the vacuous expressions on the faces of several other bus passengers, that many members of the modern generation are often ignorant, stupid, arrogant, and apathetic. And it reminded me of one of Edgar Degas' famous paintings, L'Absinthe, which shows a dreamily zotsed female with a vacant stare seated next to a dubious looking fellow smoking a pipe. And while I could perfectly visualize the image, particularly the hue of her drink, I for the life of me could not recall what that beverage OR the painting were called. A mental block.

The chemical compound thujone, active ingredient in absinthe, was no problem. It is also present in oregano, sage, and some members of the mint family. Knowing that was no help. Neither was knowing that it's distilled from wormwood, anise, and fennel.
The mind sometimes doesn't work in mysterious ways.



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IT'S CANADIAN!

At various points throughout the day holiday plans were discussed. "What are your plans for Thanksgiving?" people would brightly ask, and others would happily chirp about trips to the old family homestead, thirty or forty relatives all clustering together, aunt Agatha's famous parsnip soufflé, and needing to go outside to smoke. Which explains why no one goes to Minnesota or the Upper Peninsula for the holidays anymore. It's cold there. A cigar takes a good forty minutes of freezing your nethers off while Uncle Chadwick is comfortably inside watching the game and hooting for the team, cousin Joeboy is going back for seconds and thirds of the parsnips, and the sofa nearest the fire is filled with stuffed and snoring relatives.
Plus all the women folk have yelled "bye guys we're going shopping!" It's very cold.

Stationwagons, scarves, mufflers, woolen longjohns roaring off to the mall fifty miles away. The homestead is out in the countryside. No smoking in any of the vehicles.
You can sit on the tractor if you want.

Every year around this time pipesmokers go on the internet to write something along the lines of "can't smoke inside because of the wife and kids, heater in the garage on the fritz, and I can't feel my toes and finger tips anymore, how do you guys stand it?" The responses invariably run the gamut from "I'm a polar bear" to "I live in Hawaii". Along with one or two bastards who suggest divorce. And one guy saying "hey, your heater was busted last year, you've had ten months to have it repaired or get it replaced, what the heck is wrong with you?!?" I was the dude who mentioned Hawaii, by the way. I figured that he deserved it, and had no way of checking my location anyhow. I actually live in San Francisco where around the holidays we have typical SF summer weather. Freezing buggery rain. But he doesn't need to know that.

Among the pipes in my kit today were two Canadians. A Canadian has a long elegant oval shank and a spartan looking billiard bowl (tallish round). One smooth, Peterson Dublin and London. One a tan-coloured sandblast Savinelli DeLuxe.

Years ago I visited my uncle and aunt in Canada over the holidays. Midwinter. Calgary. No smoking inside. So yes, no, I shan't be visiting any kinfolk during the season.
At least not until Global Warming is much better.

But whenever I smoke any of my Canadians, I'll think about it.

They are very nice Canadians.



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IT'S LIKE A FROTHY LIZARD

There is always the chance that they actually were in stock. But sometimes you simply have to buy the substitute. These days more often than not. For some of the people I know life seems to have become a constant stream of discovering that something they enjoyed years ago, haven't bought in a decade or more, and fondly remembered last week, is no longer available.

Do you remember the whipped frothy lizard from Beauforts?

Yeah, well, it's no longer made. Very sorry.

Try this rat vest instead.

So John tries the rat vest, which is very good, but not quite like the whipped frothy lizard, and lacks the Parisian resonance from when he was still in college, back in the Fifties, before the floods, before the invention of cellular devices, when you could still trade a squatch for three or four frickets. Tell you what.

Life was very different then.

Yesterday someone shared with me that there used to be a product advertised during a soap opera on television back in the sixties which had a name that could not be used for marketing purposes today. Oh those good old days. He fondly remembered.

Sometimes life is not so much trying to not sound like Grampa Simpson talking about tying an onion to his belt, or his grandson Bart and not having a cow, as it is celebrating being the crazy cat lady living in a rundown gothic stand alone out near the cemetery. Go out onto the front porch and scream that all you damned kids need to get off the lawn.

And why does everything smell like a litterbox?

We all miss squatches and frickets.

Don't remind me.



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THE DASTARDS!

Per the internet, the assertion the RFK Jr was NOT bitten by a zombie is not supported be any evidence, so for the time being it would be wise to assume that in fact he WAS bitten by a zombie. And that there is a plot by the Republicans to cover up, for whatever dastardly reasons Republicans have to mislead the people.

Washington has been taken over by adrenochrome snorting lizards.
You always suspected that, but you read it here first.
Or you didn't. Okay. Then prove it.

Nano chips!


I work in Marin. Which leads, distressingly often, to interludes I wish had not happened. But as a consequence of one of those I now know all about a tunnel contructed several years ago bypassing a dangerous coastal highway which is out of synch. The shiny little mirrors engineers use had all been placed one inch higher than they should have been. This was relayed to me be a gentleman who owns one of the ugliest hats in all of new-agedom.
Who by his own admission is a native shaman.


Marin is a very mystical magic place.
With much that is meaningful.

While there, I have been told at various times to avoid gluten, meat, the colour red, dead people, and non-organic food. Because everything I eat is plastic.


What I have NOT been told there, but it's bound to happen, is that we're hanging on to outdated dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.
What we should be is an anarcho-syndicalist collective.

Also, some clipboards are better built than other clipboards, and very unfortunately they don't make that kind anymore, probably because the demographic for that sort of thing has shrunk to the point that it cannot support manufacturing them. Which is sad.
There are certain desirable characteristics.
Some of the greatest minds.

It is worth thinking about.



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SEVEN PILLS

Normally when I get up early to get to work ahead of the boss, which is every work day, I swill some strong coffee and head out for a pipe while wandering around the block. Question of mental health. And getting the juices flowing. Today is my first day back after the angioplasty. But I'll wait till I get to work before lighting up, because A) it's quite frigid out there out there, and B) there's sort of a courtesy agreement with a medical person that I will smoke less after the angioplasty. It was to actually quit entirely for a few weeks, but um yeah that's not going to happen. And I work in a place with crusty old farts in the back room who spend their waking hours sodden with tobacco products, expensive liquour, and who knows what medications that keep them alive, functioning, and semi-calm.

I'm taking seven pills a day now, per prescription.
Five of them before the anglioplasty.
New one twice a day.


Getting older means more grumpiness. Fortunately none of them are, to the best of my knowledge, psychoactive. Unlike the fossilized old fellows I deal with regularly.
Who were largely borderline insane to begin with.

History tells us that Rome was built on seven pills.


Erm. Perhaps that joke fell flat? Leastways I don't hear anybody laughing.


I'll try that line on my apartment mate to see if she clouts me good for a horrid pun. She likes wordplay but I'm not sure she has much tolerance for what's actually a crappy dad joke.


Won't float it at work. The old bastards are too dense.



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THE SHIFT CHANGE

One restaurant to which I go was opened a few years ago by someone I knew, but I rarely go there much nowadays, though I do like her place. Reason being that she herself isn't there often anymore, but a waitress whom I do not particularly like is. Said waitress very much prefers to ignore me. While I'm used to being ignored -- and don't mind me, I'll just sit here quietly dreaming over my tea till the food comes -- this one takes it to an extreme that isn't quite pleasant. I stopped going to another chachanteng nearby entirely because I noticed that crotchety old geezers my age but Cantonese were getting far better service.
And considerably more respect.

Ya know, some of us aren't as dense or oblivious as you think we are.
Anyway, I had not gone there in several weeks.

Today I went there again, mid afternoon. Oh joy, the waitress who treats me like a human being was there! And I thoroughly enjoyed my string beans stirfried with chicken over rice (四季豆雞飯 'sei gwai tau kai faan'). After I was finished I listened in on three healthcare professionals talking, mixed Canto and English, while dawdling over my milk tea.

Then I noticed, blast it, that the good waitress was being replaced by miss thing.
I'll have to make sure I remember what time the shift change happens.

It's between lunch and dinner, there's few people there.
Why does it take twenty minutes to get my check?
I know you heard me the first time.

Yes, I know middle-aged Dutchmen who smoke a pipe and can read your language are quite the nastiest thing in the universe. You live in a very small world, don't you? That old geezer who used to subtly sneer may have influenced you, but he now locomotes with an oxygen tank, and doesn't come in at all. So you might as well drop that attitude.

Zulke Toisanezen met hun rotte kapsones.


Some people from the countryside treat Hong Kongers with deference, because they know the tahi will hit the kipas if they don't. Normal Anglos also get decent treatment; who knows what those Karens will do if not? Regular foreigners too, there's that unpredictability and if you keep them happy they won't complain, they're quick, they'll pay, and leave.
But eccentric locals who speak Cantonese?
Eh, the heck with it.



There are four restaurants that proudly state that they are Toishanese.
I am, as you would expect, hesitant to even try them.
Seeing as I'm one of those.
You know.




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THE PUBLIC NUISANCES

Becomes of the looming threat of rain it is incredibly gloomy out there. Which is perfect pipesmoking weather. So if you go outside, you will probably stumble over a throng of middle aged fellows with vaguely English accents -- or Dutch, intangible cultural heritage per the UN and all that -- wearing tweeds or thick prickly sweaters, perhaps sturdy workmen's corduroy, grumbling and sipping tea. That's guaranteed. Except for the Sherlock Holmes fanclub and the Tolkien-freaks. The latter will be searching for places to have second breakfast and puff their long churchwardens while acting cute and Hobbit-like. Of which there are none in San Francisco. We have Orcs instead. So within a few years we'll finally be rid of them.

The Hobbit crowd have been largely replaced by the vape crowd anyway. It was all those fruity flavours. The Hobbiters smoked Hello-Kitty aromatics, because they had no taste and didn't actually like tobacco, so they gradually shifted to Raspberry Eagle Essence or Mango Gandalf in electronic devices, and now lurk around the tenth floor boys bathroom surrepticiously exhaling bubble gum smells.

Blissfully unaware that Orcs are puritanical and have keen noses.
Plus flavoured tobacco is banned in California.
It appeals to small people.

JRR Tolkien smoked Capstan and similar flakes, sometimes Erinmore Flake or Gold Block, especially when slumming in Cambridge, and made Hobbits the butt of all of his jokes. He detested them. Deservedly. Felt that they spread disease and were immoral.

Real tobacco, stuff worth smoking, hints delicately of terpeneols, carotenoids, terpenes, and polyphenols. All of which should be present in the cured leaf without needing additions of liquour, vanilla, or cheap soapy essences.

Precisely like real coffee does not require hazelnut, chocolate, or caramel.
And good tea needs no mango hibiscus peach cobbler syrup.
Only Hobbits drink pumpkin spice matcha.


This post turned into a severely disapproving lecture.
Blame the weather we're having.
Sorry.


Damned hippies.



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WHAT DO THEY EAT THERE?

Why is there what appears to be a sheepshead in the garbage can at my barbers? And why does it appear to be simmering in porridge? And also, why am I here after hours, to his very great surprise? He seems to be genuinely baffled by the sheepshead. And the porridge.
And it turns out he isn't actually my barber. This isn't his salon.

The most crucial questions, I realize, are why have the police come, and are these new meds making my dreams weirder?

One of my bloodpressure medications was already making dreamtime vivid. These new pills (in addition to the others I'm taking), seem to be adding another layer to that. I can smell meaty fumes from what actually seems to be a large stainless steel cooking pot.


Yesterday while shopping on Stockton Street I passed the open front of the shop that sells newfangled gottahavits, where, upon a second look, I realized that the shopkeeper was using one of the devices to prepare a tasty dish for supper: steamed egg with large clams (大蜆蒸水蛋 'taai hin jing seui daan'). It looked delicious (香香滑滑啲 'heung heung waat waat di').
I couldn't tell, through the plexi lid, whether he had added some drops of sesame oil.
And I suspect that in the last minute he would strew some scallion over it.


It does not matter if it's sheepshead stew, Scottish style, or steamed eggs a la Cantonaise. What you need to prepare either dish is a sleek newfangled cooking vessel that looks precisely like a flying saucer over a Texas city after too much bad beer.

This new medication has been shown in a very small number of patients to have an adverse effect on the liver. And while one needs one's liver to handle beer, I'm saving it for better things, and will continue to avoid liquour of any type. I am not a resident of Texas.


In all likelihood, the space aliens will be lovers of fine cuisine rather than football fanatics. They'll judge Texas accordingly. Whether they are fine with shellfish remains to be seen.


Perhaps like a great many Wasps they shy away from hot sauce.
A sploodge of Sriracha will be optional.
But recommended.


Sometime next week I should go to a chachanteng and see if they still have steamed eggs. Easy enough to make at home, but I don't feel like doing that. Meanwhile, it's time for more coffee. I've already taken my pills this morning, and might have something to eat. The new medication is not quite comfortable in an empty stomach.




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FIRST DOUBLE SOCK DAY

As is usually the case, the final stop was the bakery for a spot of hot milk tea and a pastry. It was peculiarly empty there. Perhaps the overcast darkness had something to do with that; many Cantonese are deathly scared of rain. Which I don't quite understand. They have umbrellas, I've seen them. They know how to use the things, I've seen that too.

Tissk, tissk, young people.

In my day we had to struggle for ten kilometres in howling rainstorms every day just to get to school in the morning. And it was colder than SF. For nearly seven hours we'd sit around the burning corpses of the least liked students, tightly clustered together, for warmth. We would weep copiously and cry for our mothers and free beer. Then slog again through the torrential downpour to get back home. Like it was the end of times. Every single day! Between the last week of October and the beginning of May. This younger generation is soft, I tell you.
Also, we didn't have umbrellas. We were men! We didn't need them!
And they were rare after the war.

Or at least that's how I fondly remember growing up overseas.
It rains a lot more over there. And it's wetter too.
Why, this weather is tropical!
By comparison.

It's low fifties F° out there right now. And the rain won't start till much later.

When I got to the bakery only two old geezers were there, within half an hour three more wandered in. Otherwise empty. Then the proprietress (called a 老闆娘 'lou paan neung' in Cantonese) came in, and spoke to one of them about a medical emergency previously, how does one hail a taxi here, he recommended three taxi drivers he knew, one of whom was a foreign ghost devil (鬼佬 'kwailo') at which point she expressed hesitation because how can one tell them where to go and in any case there were other reasons .....


Second time today that I'm more or less a fellow villager whose eccentricity is that I'm good with English. I guess the grey hair and long familiarity have softened that other weirdness (being Caucasian), and the fact that I write reasonably well further hides it.
Not entirely, of course. I have regrettable characteristics.
Which show no indication of disappearing.


It's probably like my being a smoker.
Some men, you know.


On the way over to the busstop I paused to admire a Heidelberger Degel-Automat (海德堡印刷機 'hoi dak pou yan chaat kei') which was visible through an open doorway of a print shop. Good machines. Still fully functional after half a century.


Anyhow, I know summer and the mellow part of Autumn are truly over, because it was necessary to put on two pairs of socks. Which makes a world of difference.
This will last for about four or five months.
Warm tootsies.



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HOW TO USE A RICE COOKER

From afar, the conversation of the workmen a few gardens over sounds like "kuhongina hamungina". Which I tried to recognize as meaningful till I realized that distance distorted things, and it was in a language I do not speak in any case. So, like my partment mate years ago watching a Taiwanese soap opera, I invented my own dialogue. And actually she wasn't watching so much as simply being in the same room as I was. I was watching. She noticed that the plump ayah and the little girl of the family wept an awful lot (there have to be several weeping jags in a Chinese soap opera otherewise it's not good) and invented some disaster involving cheese in the rice cooker as part of helpfully rendering it in English.

Dramatic exclamations, recrimination, and several well-known cheese names. The result was something of which I gladly would have watched all episodes. Monty Python's cheese shop sketch in a Chinese teevee drama format. Cheddar, mozzarella, and parmesan are widely known in Taiwan, and they have learned how to make cheesy poofs over there along the Japanese model. Which are sort of popular. Asians outside of Indonesia aren't really hep to Gouda, and I would imagine that Limburger is entirely out of the question.

The charcoal grilled bacon cheesburger with thick slices of still juicy apple-wood smoked bacon and oozy melted blue cheese is, probably, not a thing yet there.
Mmmm, also add a big scoop of sautéed mushrooms!

Sounds like an ideal breakfast.

AUTUMN MORNING IN BRABANT

By the way: the cardiologist who performed the angioplasty described the arterial buildup as being rather like parmesan. Really aged parmesan. Feel the Parmigiano Reggiano, little penguin, be the Parmigiano Reggiano, become one with the Parmigiano Reggiano!

What in Dutch we would refer to as an 'oude belegen kaas'.

There's a well-known theory, expressed best in Dutch, that we Netherlanders invented cheese ages ago and all those other Europeans merely imitated us. From which I could deduce that consequently angioplasties also must have been invented there.
Probably by doctor Goropius in the sixteenth century.


Trying to make cheesy poofs at home was undoubtedly what ruined that rice cooker. They're not built for that. Something my apartment mate instinctively knows (she's of Cantonese stock), but plump Minnanwa speaking maidservants in Taiwan probably wouldn't.
Cheese, ricecookers? Newfangled! Combine the two for better!

But I encourage you to experiment.

Aged Gouda, I think.



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NOT REALLY A CHINATOWN THING

Screaming, shouting, wailing and the gnashing of teeth. A scene from the pit. Infernal noise. Three Cantonese gentlemen talking politics and money over cups of caffeinated beverages. Urban Cantonese are sometimes like American tourists, enchanted with the belief that if you just say it loud enough the other person will understand. And, if necessary, you repeat it.

我唔識玩錢，淨係識玩蛋撻。

One of them asserted at one point that he didn't know how to pursue money, he just knew how to pursue the egg tarts. And then spent the next fifteen minutes talking on point about finance. I, meanwhile, pretended that I didn't know a single word of Cantonese and calmly continued eating my 豆腐炒魚飯 and enjoying my milk tea. My assertion fell on deaf ears, largely because the three gentlemen weren't listening. I know all of them conversationally.
And we've had discussions with each other many times at the same place.
But I'm not fluent enough, or sufficiently glib, to talk politics.
All I know about is tofu and sautéed fish rice.
With a tasty brown sauce.

Usually I don't eat there, because the food is sort of pedestrian.
But if you choose wisely, it's okay 㗎啦。
Good with Sriracha.

Strictly chachanteng, but the milk tea is excellent.

There wasn't a visit to the usual Tuesday night haunts because the bookseller went to New York. So it was an early evening. Probably just as well; the weather has gotten much colder and I haven't pulled my wintercoat out of the closet yet. I'm still pretending it's movie California out there, not arctic blast California.


After dinner, while strolling toward Sacramento Street smoking my pipe, I saw Tat Yee on the opposite side heading toward the karaoke bar. It's quite likely that the dear man is spending all of his retirement having cocktails. Punctuated by crappy pipetobacco.

It would be pointless to introduce him to the good stuff. He's happy with the Captain, and would not know where to get real tobacco anyhow. He doesn't leave Chinatown much.
Everything is available in Chinatown. Just not pipe tobacco.



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