GLAG ME WITH A SPLOON

A show I never watch (because I did not know it was a series, and frankly wouldn't find it interesting anyhow), the Great British Bake-Off, had "Mexican Week". Featuring people with English accents tasked with making approximates of Tex-Mex foods. Like "glockymolo".
I hear it was rife with mispronunciation, stereotypes, bad puns, and stupid jokes.
It sounds like an absolute blast, the cultural event of the season.

I fondly remember the chimichanga I had in London. Largely because it was inedible and I've used it in anecdotes about travel to exotic places (deepest Central London) ever since. The item could be credibly duplicated by mixing two thirds baked beans and one third canned beef stew, wrapping it in a large spongy crepe, and deepfrying it to an even mahogony. Poke it with a knife to drain out the excess oil before plating it next to limp fries, and serve it with condiments on the side. Condiments being no salsa, no hot sauce, no guacamole.
No cheese, no sour cream, no tomatoes or sliced avocado.
Just salt, pepper, and malt vinegar.

The chimichanga is a Texan food invention.

The British chimichanga is a sin.

Much like their chips.


One condiment I'm very fond of is a simple cooked guajillo salsa. It brings out the fruity quality of that dried chile. And improves stupendously after two or three days in the refrigerator. Which is also not really Mexican, but more Arizona and California.
It goes great with chiles rellenos in particular.
Or, for instance, a chimichanga.


Glockymolo. Glood Glod.


Sorry, no illustration for this post. I couldn't think of anything suitable, and I didn't want to post a picture in bad taste. Like English food.

Maybe chicken tikka masala.
That's inoffensive.
Birmingham.



AFTERTHOUGHT:
It was horribly unfair to throw Mexican food at those contestants. It uses things like spices and chilies. You know, flavour. Something with which they were quite unfamiliar.

Probable trauma. Heartache.



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INFERNAL RACKET

Friday and Saturday nights are werewolf nights in the city. Meaning that Polk Street and its cross streets are filled with twenty somethings well on their way toward inebriation, disorderly and loud of voice. As a savage puritanical Dutch American of mature years I disapprove wholeheartedly of this.

Meaning that I am distressed by loud ruckus immediately behind me while taking a last walk with my pipe after all day at the salt mines listening to the old ladies in the backroom fighting and soiling their incontinence pants over sportsgames on teevee.


All of them eat too much, dress funny and smell bad.
They are cigar smokers. And reek accordingly.
Unlike us saintly pipesmokers.

I wish those hufters behind me would shut the hell up. No one cares about the dee-licious Mexican food they had. Or however many beers they drank. They can puke in the bushes before unlocking the door to their apartment building so that they can fall asleep, drunken stupor, on the landing or out by the garbage bins where they dump the empty pizza boxes.
For the local rats and raccoons to feast upon.

Actually, I'm rather jealous of them.
I'm not social enough to party.
And I don't like noise.


It's Fleet Week. The Blue Angels are flying overhead, and there are sailors and soldiers in town. Which means suburbanite slags looking for meat roaming the streets.
Of any and all genders. As well as stages of ripeness.


I abound with sneering disapproval.



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WEATHER CHANGED

Two weeks ago it was still summer. Last night I stepped out of the house and felt bitterly cold. Autumn. Still early, but in October we do get fog, and can get some precipitation. What we don't get -- still very much a possibility elsewhere -- is snow, hail, typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, dust storms, and massive tropical downpours with flooding.

All things which make reading about the rest of the world fun.

These are things that make me glad I'm not there.


Kansas, Dorothy, this sure ain't.

We are temperate.

The nearest trailer park ain't gonna come crashing down on my street.


To the best of my knowledge, Kansas is rather like Karachi in many ways, just a whole heck of a lot worse. Same goes for the food, unless you like carrots, turnips, and corndogs.

The corndogs run wild across the prairies, digging and burrowing, and leaving holes for your mule to trip in and break its damn' neck. All over Kansas, folks have mules up on cinder blocks in their driveways. So they don't get washed away in the floods.

They don't have disastrous wildfires there, ever.
Because they rake the leaves.
The heartland.



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THEY MADE THE BEST PORTUGUESE CHICKEN RICE

A man will experience a deep and abiding sadness when there is only ONE bonbon left in the box. Alas, it seems time to by another, because there are TWO people enjoying these. And of course one doesn't want to be the person who ate the last chocky. Especially because she (my apartment mate) bought this box. The other feeling is bafflement. Did I leave only two in the box last night, thus giving her the torment of eating one and making the last one my problem? Should I have left three, so that she could dump the issue back in my lap?
Four? Or five, so that it's more abstract?


"Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, except that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out!"


If there were THREE people here, instead of just two, it would have been easier. One each, I'll go first, because I'm awake, whereas the rest of us are asleep.
At two o'clock in the morning.

Except of course then it would be too much like a nineteen seventies sit-com.

A wee bit peckish. Esurient. Sustenance required. Now more than ever I miss places like the Washington Bakery and Restaurant (華盛頓茶餐廳 'waa seng twun chaa chan teng'), which used to do a lovely Portuguese Chicken Rice. They changed four years back, then again during the pandemic, and finally this year sold the place to Hon's Wun Tun.
I'm quite okay with Hon's excellent wun tun.
But I want Portuguese Chicken.

In its Hong Kong incarnation the dish has little connection to Portugal, slightly more to East Africa, and derived mostly from Macao. Chicken, potatoes, sausage (in lieu of salt pork), mild coconut curry, and piri piri (a kind of African sambal) on the side. Often glopped over a layer of egg-fried rice and shoved under the broiler, with shredded coconut and grated cheese for extra cholesterol and flavour on top. You can understand why this is a popular dish. It's like an energy bar with real protein, carbs, and fat. Hot and bubbly, instead of cold and dry like American yuppies customarily eat. Fuel for living.

Few chachanteng make it with linguiça to render a cooking grease, and some of them take shortcuts with the curry. The ABC Restaurant on Jackson Street, which closed five years ago, made their with mushrooms and green bellpepper in the sauce. Sheer heresy! I ate it often. There was also a place which had a stellar version, where I stopped going several years before then, because the waitress indicated that one of her friends needed a husband. Seeing as the image people have of me does NOT match the reality, I didn't want to end up sowing disappointment all around. So I don't know if they even have the same cook.

[Now, if the woman was in her late twenties or early thirties and simply wanted the occasional stimulating company of a Dutch American who stank of pipe tobacco and had no realistic plans for the future, that would be fine. But such people are rare, and sadly do not wear signs or buttons stating exactly that, so that one might recognize them. I am resigned to eating a full serving if and when I find another place.]

Lunch today will be at home. Minor, and uninspired.
I'll go out for teatime later at a bakery.
A pipe afterwards is a certainty.


And yes, I'll be buying another box of bonbons.


NOTE: If I were to make "Portuguese Chicken Curry" myself, I'd semi-fry up some bacon first for the cooking fat, because I do not have linguiça in my larder. Instead of bellpepper, some Jalapeños for flavour and crunch. And fresh tomato chunks too.
The egg-fried rice would be authentic.



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SUNSHINE BREAKFAST

Last walk of the night was through fog. A friend remarked that he hoped that there would be fog, dense fog, this weekend when the military jets fly over male organ wagging happens for Columbus Day ("fleet week"), which is Dianne Feinstein's lasting contribution to noise pollution in SF. He might get his wish.

Because I am working all of those days in Marin, it's sausage to me.

The weather looks like mid sixties till the middle of next week. Which is perfect. It may lessen the urge for some people to dress immodestly. I'm thinking of milk bottle white pudgy legs on old men, exposed by shorts. Yes no. Regarding velvety waists on women celebrating that they are young and in shape unlike you auntie, I'm okay.
Neither for nor against.

Though opposed to belly button rings. Like the shiny metal snot drop that some people have through their nose, which also irks me. Both of those things are peculiar. Neither the nose nor the navel are improved, and there is no added functionality. So why?
One also has to wonder about scar tissue.


Speaking of which, my own navel sort of offends me. The scar from my appendectomy disfigures it, not that it was a thing of beauty before. Plus the lint is not what it was.
There used to be a little fluffy fibre clump there every morning.

The name of this post ("sunshine breakfast") is what a restaurant I like calls their start of the day menu. I do not eat that early, and frankly, beef brisket noodle soup (牛腩牛筋湯粉 'ngau naam ngau gan tong fan'), panfried pork and chive dumplings (煎韭菜饺 'jin gau choi gaau'), or a steak and two pan fried eggs (牛扒煎雙蛋 'ngau paa jin seung daan'), do not appeal to me in the morning. The shredded pork with pickled mustard-cabbage (雪菜肉絲湯粉 'suet choi yiuk si tong fan') might -- it's a very Shanghai and exiles living in Hong Kong dish, and very nice -- but staring bleakly into the void over coffee followed by a walk with a pipe is much more my style. Bleary eyed, barely awake, and solitarily stinky.

Red Virginia. Then home, bladder, second cup.
Breakfast of champions.



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THIS ISN'T THERE

San Franciscans are used to hearing how much better stuff elsewhere is. The pizza in New York and Chicago, the Indian food in London and Manchester, oh the bagels, and Italians know so much more about good coffee! As well as that our Chinese food is lousy when compared to the exquisite delicacies of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, and Osaka. Or New York. Our Chinese food is NOT as good as the kung pao and general joe's served in the big apple. And the dumplings and Hunanese deliciousness of Tapei!
Sniff, sneer, and grimace; you poor provincials.
Why, it's veritable pig slop!

Mmm, okay. Please go there.


Now, imagine ALL of that combined with the typical Chinatown behaviour patterns: polite self-depreciatory tendencies, a need to one-upman (very Asian), and the desire to take control of and maintain the Chineseness of certain things.

This restaurant is not particularly good, there's much better and more authentic grub at some place where we are not, and you should taste what they do at a totally authentic hole in the wall where no one speaks English and the mud of the rice paddies in the Imperial City is imported for the delight of the patrons.

Gentlemen. It's excellent. I've had this in many other places. Plus I speak and read enough Chinese that I don't care if they can't understand English. And mud is mud.
The refined silky mud from the imperial city is ... still mud.

Heck, Hunan is ALL mud. Kind of like New York.

Lunch today was at a place I very much like. It's a chachanteng, which an old acquaintance sneered was not very good and they don't know how to cook, despite the fact that I've seen him there over a dozen times since they re-opened last year. Two other people sneered that it was mediocre and prefer a place where the food is barely passable.

I enjoyed my meal very much. Fillet of sole with garlic butter baked in foil, rice, the obligatory green stuff (broccoli), plus a nice cup of milk tea. Set lunch number three (C-faan). Between twelve and two it's packed. Happy people. Including many who can't speak English, eating Hong Kong spaghetti with their porkchop or chicken leg.

Gentlemen, a Hong Kong Western restaurant is NEVER authentic. But if the customers leave satisfied and come back regularly, it's ABSOLUTELY authentic. And there are several places which San Francisco isn't. Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Manchester, New York, Osaka Peking, and Tapei among them.

We're fine. Honest.



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MY DIGESTION IS FINE. WHY DO YOU ASK?

Much of the stuff I read is either scientific or related to history and languages. Wikipedia is an endless source of fascination -- the embedded clickable links within any article are often new rabbit holes -- and sometimes the bloggosphere reveals people with obscure specialties and incredible depths of knowledge.

[Yes, I know that Wikipedia has been criticised. But there are checks and balances there, it's self-correcting over time, and as long as one reads about controversial subjects with a modicum of scepticism, it's extremely reliable. Most of the nuts have gravitated to the dark webb (Truth Social, 4-Chan, Instagram, Snapchat, Percenters, and Wyoming Armed Rabble Patriots Inc.). Collectively, the violent and mostly Republican bat shit crazy fringe.]

And, sometimes, I enjoy true crime.

Or read about sleaze.


Having acquired a new book recently, I am fully occupied at present.

Need to tear myself away from this one, so that I can go have lung lei yü (龍脷魚) over rice, with sambal, and milk tea on the side.

The book pictured above is about former president Donald Trump. Whom I believe is a true Christian. I effing hate Christians.


This iteration of Cornell & Diehl's Carolina Red Flake is pretty damn' good.

I've made sure I've got several tins of it.



IRRELEVANT SPITEFUL AFTERTHOUGHTS

Many Trump-voting Christians probably smoke shitty aromatics, a very popular category of pipe tobacco that far outsells the decent stuff. Or they purchase scented candles and wear pants with stretchy waist bands. Wyoming, I hear, is filled with them.

Rightwing Christian shitholes: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

They can all go suck on a potato.



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YUMMY AND DELICIOUS!

The Hus Fu Chi brand mango cake is yummy and delicious. Hsu Fu Chi (徐福記) is based in Canton, the mango and pineapple cakes are very Taiwanese. And dang they're good. Which I discovered quite by chance, having picked up a box of the mango flavour last week. Yesterday I bought both types. Repeat: yummy and delicious!

[The style of confection is "pineapple cake" (鳳梨酥 'fung lei sou'). Even when it involves entirely different flavours.]

Got home before twelve last night. Our weekly pub crawl is a restrained affair. But it does involve noise. Other people's noise. Loud music at one place, caterwauling (karaoke) at another.


Several observations, from the lighting up of the pipe for watching rats in Spofford Alley (only one rat, big and pale brown) till the last smoke of the night:

The pilgrim is no longer allowed into the karaoke bar, Chinatown merchants have hired a man to paint over grafiti, arguments over money that having nothing at all to do with food at the burger joint delay cooking, and one person there has a restraining order from his parents, tea is best fairly hot, white women should not sing dreary seventies songs, at least one white woman has a yen for the Chinese fellow with a laptop, who hates remarks about his accent (sort of East Coastian) who does NOT speak Mandarin (even though I heard him doing so), fat white men should show restraint around karaoke machines and not make bad decisions, and at least two soldiers and one sailor have recently been off-pissed (scraps of conversation on Grant Avenue). Also, Mister Siu's angry dachshund is old, and calmer now.
Doesn't yip viciously as much.
Arthritic.


Also, other than wanky health, there is nothing actually wrong with me. All of the foregoing is good to know. I had the last piece of mango cake from the first box after I came home. That's why this essay started with it. It was yummy (and delicious), and I'm glad there's more.

徐福記厚切鳳梨酥芒果口味，鳳梨(菠蘿)口味

[Insert Homer Simpson sounds here.]



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SANE MEN FROM BRABANT

Our two most famous painters are Brueghel and Van Gogh. Our best poet was probably Brederode, a second generation transplant to the North who was a certifiable crap disturber and problem drinker, and the most well known politician we've had in recent times is a man so odious that I do not wish to mention his name. Actually, that last one is a crapshoot; at least seven gentlemen qualify.

Severely mixed blessings, if blessings at all.

And adulated in dubious circles.


It's probably the landscape: sandy soil and peat. Bogs, swamps, and moors. Blasted heaths and grim dark colours. Overcast, gloom, rain, mists, vapours. Grey. Or on occasion a harsh sunlight cutting everything like a saw. As well as a phenomenal narrowness of the gene pool, which leads to psychosis, visions, and a near-Russian tendency toward intoxicatory behaviours as the be all and end all of civilized life.

Sometimes I miss the smell of fermenting tobacco leaves (for the cigar industry) that seemed omnipresent in a few towns, or freshly brewed coffee in one of the local herbergs, and a few times I've caught myself wishing for unidentifiable deepfried objects.
The cuisine relies on vinegar and molasses.
Perhaps perfectly.

My friend Herman played his bagpipes outside the church at four or five in the morning, several times. Waking the local priest, who at least once composed a fierce and eloquent sermon anent heathen instruments and deviant boozery for the edification of congregation that morning (a Sunday), several of whom started speculation about the poor man's sanity that went on for many months. Sad, because he was a remarkably sane man.

Sane people often have a hard time of it there.
Civilization is remarkably near by.
And so very far off.



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MORE INSULATED

Late lunch yesterday was decent, not mediocre, but strictly "decent", and I'll probably go there again in a few weeks. They're struggling, it's not the kind of place that caters to tourists but just another one of the many places run by local Chinese around C'town which did better before the pandemic. So I'm glad to see that they are maintaining.

Returned home after my post lunch pipe smoke, and spent a few hours drawing a farmhouse, in a bleak Autumnal landscape, rural North Brabant. I don't think I could really hack the weather in Autumn there anymore, I've become fussy about temperatures.

I lived in that region from my toddler years to late teenagehood.
Returned to the States for college.

Seeing as you cannot smoke indoors anymore, I need a climate wich is bearable all year around. Preferably nowhere near freezing. And anything above mid-seventies is too hot.

San Francisco, most of the time, is perfect.

I love foggy evenings. And rain, when we have it.
The fire season not so much.

All the necessities of civilized life can be found here. Yorkshire tea. Oxford marmelade. Sriracha hot chili sauce (是拉差香甜辣椒醬). Bookstores, libraries, Fernet Branca. We're comfortable, and very happy to read about nasty stuff elsewhere in the world, horrible places like Texas or Florida. Or the low vaccine rates in Mississippi and North Carolina.
Plus wars, pestilence, Trump, and Jeppson's Malört.


I'm already mapping out the inoperative storefronts in C'town that have good awnings for the rainy season, as that is where I'll seek shelter when smoking a pipe after lunch. By a happy coincidence, there's a good stretch of metal awning very close to the clinic where my doctor and pharmacy are. Plus another nearly two blocks over down the street from my favourite grocery store, AND one across the street. The tourists won't be around then, so no one will bellyache about the horrible smell of TOBACCO traumatizing them and upsetting their gluten allergy, sugar intolerance, MSG sensitivity, and inability to wear anything but the purest native fibres no chemicals dammit and is it green.

As you can tell from the portrait above, I don't need no stinking pure native fibres.
Rabies shot perhaps, and probably a raincoat.
And a cup of tea if you're offering.



By the way: while tobacco is severly frowned upon in California, marijuana is perfectly okay, because it's grown by little green men in the Amazon. Who hug dolphins. It's natural.



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NATIONAL TACO DAY? OCTOBER FOURTH!

The horrid office tradition of Taco Tuesday, a made-up occurance of scant appeal and no significance, gets a shot in the arm tomorrow. Which is National Taco Day. Trust me, this doesn't equal National Donut Day, June 2nd. this year, when we celebrated Dutch American heritage, dressed in clogs and tulips, and drank Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, as we pranced gaily down main street in a festive parade with drum bands and majorettes.
Oh, it was fabulously festive, a celebratory family event!
I didn't do so, but I assume you did.

Never-the-less, and evenso.

National Taco Day.

Whoopee.

A good reason to start drinking at six A.M. Either añejo tequila or Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. To wash down America's favourite food, which George Washington ate at Valley Forge before he slept here.

As if you needed an excuse for tacos and añejo tequila or Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, you dog you. Any occasion or national holiday is as good a reason as any for tacos and añejo tequila or Pappy Van Winkle bourbon! Mothers' Day, Donut Day, July Fourth, Christmas! Even Hallowe'en, when you add seasonal Autumn pumpkin flavour to everything, from Starbucks frappooh to cough syrup to scented candles.


Embassies and consulates of the United States will host parties for local dignataries and invited well-wishers where they'll serve tacos and añejo tequila and Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. It's a way of winning friends and influencing minds favourably among them.

Bunting, we must buy bunting!
We need to decorate!



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THERE HAVE TO BE LIMITS!

For the first time in my life I am hip. Good lord. Reason being that I'm fully vaccinated against any number of ailments, like pertussis, the pneumonia strain that hits elderly people harder, tetanus, rightwingism, and Covid.

Nearly eighty percent of the US population have had one shot, almost seventy percent have gotten two, and a third of us have received a booster.

The national averages are pulled down, of course, by the stupid states -- places mostly in the red part of the country, bless their hearts -- but here in California we also have pools of profound dumbassity.

But apparently Marin and San Francisco are not as bad as they used to be.


CITE:

"It kind of became the cool thing to do to get vaccinated," said Naveen Kumar, physician-in-chief for Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center.

Among children 5 to 11, 80% in Marin County have both of their COVID-19 shots, more than double the statewide or national rates. The rate among those younger than 5 is more than five times the nation’s.

SOURCE: SFGate -- Once known for vaccine skeptics

Note: The worst vax states are Wyoming, Mississippi, and North Carolina. There is no there there in Wyoming, it's like the concave back end of nowhere, Mississippi shows up on every list of worst whatever, it's so damned third world it might as well be the empty white spot on the map somewhere beyond terra incognita, and North Carolina is where every middle-aged yuppie tax dodger and child bride husband wanna-be in California has relocated in the past decade bless their degenerate hearts and good luck to them.

[Of course there's also Florida and Texas, proving that sheer stupidity can have superlatives.]


All my life I've wanted to be statistically as hip or hipper than the high school kids of Marin.
I am so very, very chuffed. A dream finally realized. Sniff.

My worst fears at this point are that Marin kids will now also discover pipe tobacco, hot tea, and Nabokov or Simenon. If they do, there won't be enough for me.
Or, preserve us, À la recherche du temps perdu.

What is this world coming to?



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AMERICAN FEARS

During the latter half of September, we learned that most Americans are scared of black mermaids. Well, many of them. Having myself never run across a mermaid, and done nothing to piss her off, I myself do not have any such fear.
Also, I haven't swum in years.

Not because of mermaids, but because too many of you piss in the pool.
Most of my fellow Americans are pretty fair disgusting.
Plus I don't know what you're carrying.


Apparently you're also terrified of accents (mine), and people smoking pipes in public (me). So instead of pissing in the pool, could you all kindly go piss up a rope?
Thank you all so much in advance.



Next up, why can't Pocahontas be a white woman, like everyone else? Stop teaching our kids that she wasn't. It's your bias against Protestant Americans, isn't it? I'll throw a fit!
And tell Ron De Santis!

Somebody do something!
Dang liberals!



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FLORIDA HAD IT COMING

Regarding the disaster that befell Florida, have we considered that it's all because they don't read the Good Book enough down there? Their self-imposed ignorance and illiteracy are manifestly not virtues, and AND they've willingly accepted weird hoodoo and santeria from the Cuban community. As sinful a den of godless hedonists could not be found like the entire Okeefenokee State. Miami, Disney, and cruise ships. It can't get any more undeserving Christian that that.

They're still getting off considerably lighter than Sodom and Gomorrah.

They should all be pillars of salt, the sinful heathens.

To use the immortal words of Pastor Bill Shanks: "God simply, I believe, in his mercy purged all of that stuff out of there—and now we’re going to start over again."
Michael Marcavage: "This act of God destroyed a wicked city."
Rick Scarborough: "Could this be a playing out of prophecy?"

Fred Phelps would have agreed, but the Good Lord condemned him, and caused him to sufferingly decease on March 19, 2014. In his abundant mercy.

Now that that festering abode of sin has been destroyed, let us not rebuild it. That would be communism in action and a waste of taxpayer money. String barbed wire along the northern border of the disaster zone, and if any of them cross, relocate the refugees to Texas.

Better yet, dig a deep trench and fill it with burning lizards.

FEMA camps would be too good.

Can I get an 'amen'?



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WHO IS COCO CHOW?

"Is McConnell approving all of these Trillions of Dollars worth of Democrat sponsored Bills, without even the slightest bit of negotiation, because he hates Donald J. Trump, and he knows I am strongly opposed to them, or is he doing it because he believes in the Fake and Highly Destructive Green New Deal, and is willing to take the Country down with him? In any event, either reason is unacceptable. He has a DEATH WISH. Must immediately seek help and advise from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!"
------Donald J. Trump.



Donald J. Trump is a true christrian patriot endorsed by all true christian patriots, as well as a paragon that true christian patriots look up to, adulate, and follow; a veritable example of the conduct the world expects from true christian patriots.

All true christian patriots will uphold this recent utterance by the forty fifth president of the United States as patriotic christian truth.

His statement is a perfect expression of true christian patriotism.


I do not willingly associate with true christian patriots.

A man is known by the company he keeps.



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OCTOBER, SUCH A GREAT MONTH!

What, you may ask, is so great about October? For one thing, you can all wake up now, September has ended. Come on, wake up! For another thing, Donald Trump will get more setbacks and horrible news. For a third, my birthday occurs this month. Additionally, by approximately and precisely October 13th. the third booster (Omicron variant) will hit full effect, and I'll reach lift-off. I will blast free of this lousy stinking planet and hurl myself into space, toward new adventures and a golden future!
Or I'll achieve 5G and telepathic powers!
In any case, something marvelous.

Fall weather. Cups of tea, and some lovely medium flake in my pipe. Awakened zombies, little werewolves. The smell of putrifying pumpkins in the crisp air.
Or is that people farting as they leave Starbucks?
Most likely the latter.

Several years ago a local tobacco store introduced me hopefully to a seasonal flavour, pumpkin spice, of which I took one good whiff good frikken' lord, and ran off screaming.
I do not know if the world is ready for pumpkin spice tobacco, but I'm not by a mile.
It's one of very many repulsive ideas tobacco companies have had.
Along with Molto Dolce and Blue Note.

In any case, rabbit rabbit.

It is traditional to say "rabbit rabbit" first thing on the first day of the month. But for this blog, abstaining from posting anything from noon on Friday till after nightfall on Saturday, is also traditional. Consequently please assume that I have been silent entirely for several hours.
Which if you know me will defy belief. Rabbit rabbit.


BTW: Is Kanye a whiny twat? Asking, because my apartment mate brought it up. It doesn't relate to this post in any way, but inquiring minds don't you know.


Anyhow, birthday month. Traditionally I don't celebrate, as it simply gets worse every year and I don't want to encourage these things. I'm older every time. Not mentioning what day it is, or whatever ghastly knackered old age I will have reached. I'm thirty two or three, okay? Been that way for ages. Dammit. Thirty two or three.

Please, NO pumpkin spice flavour.
Sickening stuff.



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TASTES LIKE CHILDHOOD

Over on one of the pipe forums, someone mentioned that they mixed Captain Black Grape and HH Rustica, and man oh man is it delicious! No. Captain Black Grape is a pipe tobacco that does NOT taste like tobacco at all, doesn't bite, and reeks phenomenally of grape soda. It is not an adult tobacco.

HH Rustica is entirely adult tobacco. I have two open tins.
It will take me a while to finish it all.

Captain Black Grape has been discontinued, and is achieving cult product status among the basement dwelling degenerates in the pipe smoking community. Naturally I did not comment underneath his post, because I don't want to attract their attention. I have NO need to be beaten to death by pierced and tattooed Gandalf wannabees.
They're heretics, and probably unstable.
Men of dubious morals.

Pervs.

Besides, there's Captain Black Watermelon now.

I smoked nearly a dozen bowls of test batches of CB Grape when it was still in development; mercifully I have been spared the watermelon incarnation.

There's also key lime pie pipe tobacco.



I spent all day yesterday in discomfort from the Bivalent Covid booster shot. Nasty froo froo aromatics (ie: grape, watermelon, key lime pie) would NOT have made that situation any more bearable. But the bowl of C&D red Virginias did.
Jolly good stuff, that. B'emmes.
Medicinal.



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BEAN MUCK

According to an internet test, I am "outgoing, cheerful, adventurous, and unique". Which is a load of hogwash. Or that's the dating app version my imaginary alter ego would like to spread. If anything, I am a heretofore unknown species of scorpion.
Scorpions are known for being nurturing moms.
But not pack, swarm, or herd animals.

And that 'nurturing moms' bit doesn't count either.


Ten years ago I signed on to a dating site. Nine years ago I closed that account. Everyone there was "outgoing, cheerful, adventurous, and unique". And they wanted to raft down the Amazon with a supportive vegan while walking a golden retriever on a moon-lit beach.
Some of them had meaningful tattoos. Soft music.


I have a suspicion that most of them would be averse to the restaurants I go to, uninterested in the things I like, object to my smoking a pipe unless it was in LOTR format where I act like Gandalf or a Hobbit, and upset over my tendencies to culturally appropriate without the proper worshipful attitude.

Also, I do not river-raft, lack a dog of any kind, and haven't been on a moonlit beach in very many years if ever. My tattoos are meaningful entirely by their complete non-existence.

Emotional support "dog".

And as for that Amazon thing, the closest I wish to come is seeing the movie 'Fitzcaraldo' again. You do realize that they have brain eating amoebas, Chagas disease, dengue fever, dysentery, leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, tuberculosis, dozens of mosquito born illnesses, poisonous bugs, violent locals, and Jair Bolsonaro down there, don't you?

Butch heathens dancing samba and winning soccer games.

[A good friend who passed away recently spent quite a bit of time in Brazil, till he escaped from prison. He didn't enjoy it. Said it was worse than being in Vietnam or Rhodesia. I think he kind of liked Rhodesia.]

The national dish is bean muck.


Here is a short list of culturally appropriated terms for medical issues and conditions which are commonplace in the Amazon Basin. Bad basin.

Acute renal failure: 急性腎損傷 ('gap sing san syün seung').
Acute tubular necrosis: 急性腎小管壞死 ('gap sing san siu kun waai sei').
Anemia: 貧血 ('pan huet').
Candida albicans: 白色念珠菌 ('paak sik nim jyu kwan').
Chagas disease: 恰加斯病 ('hap gaa si peng').
Cholecystitis: 膽囊炎 ('daam nong yim').
Cytomegalovirus: 巨細胞病毒屬 ('keui sai baau beng dok suk').
Dengue fever: 骨痛熱症 ('gwat tung yit jeng').
Dysentery: 痢疾 ('lei jat').
Feijoada: 厭惡嘅爛泥糊豆糞肥 ('yim ngok ge laan nei wu dou fan fei').
Hemoglobinuria: 血紅素尿症 ('huet hong sou niu jeng').
Idiopathic compression of the median nerve: 腕隧道綜合症 ('wun seui tou jung hap jeng').
Jair Bolsonaro: 雅伊爾·博索納羅 ('ya yi yi·bok suk na lwo').
Jaundice: 黃疸 ('wong taan').
Leprosy: 痲瘋 ('lam fung').
Leptospirosis: 鈎端螺旋體病 ('gau duen lo suen tai bing').
Leukocyte: 白細胞 ('baak sai baau').
Lymphatic philariasis: 淋巴絲蟲病 ('lam baa si chong beng').
Malaria: 瘧疾 ('yeuk jat').
Malarial hemoglobinuria: 瘧疾嘅血紅蛋白尿 ('yeuk jat ge huet hong daan baak niu').
Monomorphism: 單態射 ('daan taai yek ').
Mosquito borne illnesses: 蚊子傳播嘅疾病 ('man ji chuen bo ge jat beng').
Naegleria fowleri: 福氏內格里蟲 ('fuk si noi gaak lei chong').
Onchocerciasis: 蟠尾絲蟲症 ('pun mei si chong jeng').
Plasmodium falciparum: 惡性瘧原蟲 ('ngok sing yeuk yuen chung').
Poisonous bugs: 毒蟲 ('tuk chong').
Tuberculosis: 結核病 ('git hat beng').
Urinary tract infection: 泌尿道感染 ('bei niu dou gam yim').
Verruca: 蹠疣 ('jik yau').
Violent locals: 嚎叫嘅野蠻人 ('hou kiu ge ye maan yan').

Please note that NONE of these terms are actually relevant in San Francisco. Incidence of 'black water fever' and other tropical ailments is quite uncommon here. Almost unknown.
But I'm prepared. Just in case.

I will NOT be rafting down a tropical river in the moonlight with a fluffy dog.
I am NOT "outgoing, cheerful, adventurous, and unique".
I'm actually kinda pissy and I smell bad.
Like tea and pipe tobacco.

Stupid internet survey.



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All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
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