In Which We Gel

How do you get gelatin? Originally, it was just the boiled down remains of slaughtering, horns and hooves and fish heads, all the crap nobody wanted to eat.  It was the scrap of scraps.  It rendered out a squishy, fairly clear glop.  Some misguided chef somewhere realized you could suspend more edible bits in it and, voila, in a marketing masterpiece, they called it aspic and somehow it became fancy.  No excessively fancy Victorian or Edwardian dinner was complete without it.  It was not sweet particularly, but was often part of the fish or meat course. Food scientists discovered an easier way to make it, they added sweeteners and fruit flavor and what did they have? They had jello, baby. 

That brings us up to the madness of the post-World War II era.  Homemakers of the time were wild for any product that made the drudgery of domestic life easier.  Canned food, frozen food, and anything labeled "instant" was a big hit.  Jello fit right in plus it had the added panache of aspic's reputation as gourmet grub.  Bridge clubs everywhere were swept up in a frenzy for it.  "The girls" couldn't get enough; a luncheon consisting of coffee, cigarettes, gin, jello, and gossip was guaranteed to get you through another week of your loveless marriage and those fucking kids.  

Hearkening back to its roots as a medium in which you could suspend all manner of random crap, recipes proliferated claiming to be "salads" since that implied health and slenderizing. One of the most popular of those so-called salads was for Ambrosia, which was a mixture of jello, whipped cream, canned fruit cocktail, and the always disgusting dried coconut.  

As a baby gay in the mid-60s, how mrpeenee longed for Ambrosia without coconut.  Dried coconut, in mrpeenee's unshakable opinion, is unfit for human consumption.  I would just as soon chow down on a piece of shag carpeting.  mrpeenee's mother (mapeenee) absolutely refused to consider this very minor modification.  "Coconut is in the recipe," she would state adamantly.  A recipe in her world was something that might as well have been etched in stone.  Looking back I can only sympathize with the poor dear.  She had four kids and a husband whose only contribution to housework was to open yet another bottle of cheap scotch. Her life was not easy breezy.

But that was then, and now it's a new day, a day in which mrpeenee is fully capable of making his own damn jello, anyway that I want to.  The internet was only too happy to provide me with thousands of recipes for ambrosia.  I landed on one called Orange Fluff which expanded its madness to include Cool Whip, miniature marshmallows, and vanilla instant pudding in the mix.  I have now made it twice and it is just as delicious as I dreamed all those many years ago in the suburban swamps which formed me. 

I know this kind of cooking (or "cooking".  The preparation only calls for boiling water and stirring) is often sneered at, but I am here to vouch that it is tasty in the extreme.  It may not be Julia Childs, but neither am I.  What it is is a product of those mid-century women's magazines just as much as I am.  Here's to you ladies. 

Boys for whom I would firm up: 

That's what I need to help me in the kitchen.

Boeuf al a mode

Just a simple boy wondering where the fuck his underwear is.

Wheeee

There are some men for whom clothes are not only overrated, they are almost a crime.

Exhibit A

The strain of trying to think.  Don't bother sweetie, it's not what you were meant for.

In Which We Are Lost

 

Is that stupid Mercury back in retrograde AGAIN?  Because I am in the midst of a string of small time disasters. 

Last week I was on my way to the chiropractor riding in Waymo (the local driverless robot taxi, because I am a fancy boy.)  I hopped out, took two steps and realized I was wearing my sunglasses and my regular glasses had fallen out of my pocket in the backseat of the car that was disappearing into the distance.

When I turned to my dear friend Diane von Austinburg to complain about the loss, she very perceptively asked if I had lost another pair of glasses because she knew that I had just replaced my sunglasses less than a month ago.  That's why it's important to remember dear friends can actually know too much.  I have now decided to simply staple these new glasses to my forehead. 

I was already brooding about these annoying and very expensive calamities when I thought to console myself with a cookie.  The very first bite included something much harder than you would expect in a chocolate chip cookie.  When I fished it out of my mouth it turned out to be a crown.  

My dentist, God love her, got me in the very next day to reattach the crown.  Inspection of the site where it used to live revealed a small cavity, the first one I've had in years.  She breezily assured me she would fill the cavity without any numbing since the nerve there had been removed originally and before I could marshal any protest based on how horrifying that idea is, that's exactly what she did. 

So the obvious answer to all this misplacement is to simply never leave my apartment again.   If I can't see and I can't chew, I will simply have to sit here in the dark waiting for the end.  

Boys I wish I could find: 

Exhibit A.

I also tried to convince Diane that the evening when my dinner consisted of most of a bag of Cheetos meant that I was now a vegan, but she didn't fall for it.

Ready, steady, go.

Our old friend Giancarlo Volti.

Shapely

In Which We Are Mystified

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In Which We Celebrate

 

My birthday is coming up soon and I will be 71 years old, to be mathematically exact.  I had thought I would start ignoring any birthday that doesn't end in multiple 0s, but Diane von Austinburg offered to come out to help celebrate, and any visit from her is always something to look forward to so I am pretending to be a good sport about the whole sorry mess, but there had better not be any choruses of Happy Birthday.  I hope she doesn't get caught up in the ongoing collapse of American airports.  It's only a 3-hour flight out here from Austin and I would hate for her to spend more than that long waiting in line. 

Another reason I am willing to acknowledge this anniversary is that my birthday this year falls on Easter Sunday.  This is only the second time in all these years that that has happened, but it has been a near miss before.  I remember when I was very young my mother made cupcakes that looked like little tiny Easter baskets 

Isn't that adorable?

That was absolutely remarkable because my poor mother, god rest her sainted self, was not a very enthusiastic baker. With four kids and a crappy oven, it's hard to blame her.  So yay for her cranking out a bunch of cupcakes with pipe cleaners as handles, jelly beans as Easter eggs, and tinted coconut as grass.  I don't remember anything else about them particularly and I also don't remember my mother's reaction when I announced I do not like dried coconut.  It's hard being a mom.

Also, completely unrelated to my birthday festivities, I wanted to mention that in comments generated by my recent post about the difficulty in understanding British accents, several of my English readers revealed their varying dialects.  None of them were defensive about it, because all my readers are very nice people, and I appreciate their restraint since looking back at the post I realize I was, uhm, a tiny bit insensitive.  I don't think I actually referred to anyone as having a speech impediment, but it was a near miss, so please accept my humble apologies.  Having read their very English blogs for years, I had always assumed somehow that they all spoke with the most refined, poshest, received pronunciation, Agatha Christie inspired, BBC shipping news articulation.  But it's a funny ol worl, innit?

Guys who need to be my birthday presents

Speaking of birthday cakes . . . .

Let's go for a ride.

Did I mention it's spring?

Spring has sprung.

Time to enjoy the great outdoors.

I'm sitting with all the windows open listening to the knuckleheads down on the street yodeling.

Even in permanently mild weathered San Francisco, we're glad to put winter behind us.

In Which We Are Planted

 

I have no idea where I got the impression that the black plastic pots plants come in from the nursery are not suitable as long-term housing for the plants, but I have for decades been adamant about transferring them into what I believed were more suitable containers.  More informed gardeners and professional landscapers have insisted to me, using small words because they thought that's what I needed, that that is not true, that the black plastic pods are just fine.  But a) they're wrong and b) those cheap pots may be utilitarian, but, man, are they ugly and c) shut up. 

When I had my house and garden up in the canyon, my obsession with repotting was no big deal.  I had a big patio with plenty of room to work in and any mess I made (and I always made a mess) was easy to clean up with a hose and a broom.  Now that I have relocated to an apartment with only a few insolent house plants, my efforts at giving them a new, more attractive spot are considerably more difficult. 

The subject has unfortunately come up again because late last year I bought a really charming fiddle leaf ficus.  It has been a great addition to my tiny collection of house plants, and so I decided it was time to give it a real pot.   Repotting is not really very difficult, but since I have to pull it off in the kitchen, The whole operation is a little more complicated.

Especially since the ficus is fairly tall and the pot is sizable.  But I am a genius and also not all that fussy about the final product.  I always explain to any plant that has come into my grasp "You have two options: live or die." 

In the end, it all came out fine

Ficuses are notorious for going into shock if you move them around and then dropping all their leaves to prove have a delicate they are, but this one seems to be less crazed than that and I hope it will be happy in its new home. 

Boys I'd like to put in a pot:

Au naturel

Much like PhotoShopping, I have decided not to struggle against AI created beefcake.

Are these guys real?  They are real enough

If we can't tell easily if it's AI, then maybe it's not worth the grief of worrying.

AI slop?   I want to slop him

Classical

In Which We Detect

 

I've been on an absolute spree of (mostly) British cop shows, procedurals set all over the sceptered isle.  These range from the excellent (Ellis) to the execrable (Vera), but almost all of them suffer from the cliche of the lead character being damaged and dark.  Maybe that's realistic, they are cops after all. But I'm not interested in Detective Chief Inspector Whatshername's trauma.  I just want to see the bad guys get arrested and thrown in the back of a cop car with the steering wheel on the wrong side. 

Also, why do so many of these supposedly professionals find it so difficult to keep it in their pants around the other supposedly professionals they work with?  As soon as there is an adult male and an adult female in the same interview room, you know they are going to be bumping nasties in the next scene and it will inevitably lead to Drama. Guiltily avoiding eye contact, harsh whispered confrontations in the hall, and then his wife kicking him out or her husband demanding to know who the real father is.  In the meantime, nobody can figure out who dumped the body in the river.  Well Clive, maybe if you could keep your sausage out of Anita's pork pie you might realize it was the roommate.  Duh. 

The worst part though are the accents.  I speak English, honest, and technically so do these characters, so why do I have to watch with subtitles on in order to understand what they're trying to say?  The USA has five times the population of Great Britain, but our entire country has fewer dialects than you find in two adjoining English counties. Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool: they don't fool me, they're making it all up as they go along.  And the further north you go, the more indecipherable it gets.  I tried watching a show set in Scotland, dear God.  Called An t Eilean, the dialogue is in a jumble of Celtic and English, a hash which might as well have been Urdu.  Confusingly, the little scraps of English I could understand did not always match up with the subtitles.  That was enough to convince me to give up, especially in conjunction with the plot holes (the action opened with some woman in Paris getting a call from her father in Scotland saying he'd been shot. Dude, wut? I don't care how thick your accent is, surely you could figure out how to call an ambulance).

So why do I stick it out with these shows?  Because when they're good, they are so much better than American ones, looking at you, Law & Order, the mega franchise that will not die. Anyway I got to go, I have a cold case waiting that depends on an illegal search (are warrants not a thing in England?) and I have to figure out what the slang Gilly is insulting Cletus with.

Guys:

Frisk me daddy.

Everybody's favorite cellmate.

Today's naked guys are brought to you by the letter D.

Sculptural.

Don't squint, it'll give you frown lines.

I have to end it here, Toby is demanding attention and I have tacos calling me.

In Which We Have a Nice Day

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