TubaOrNotTuba

Without comedy we might not realise just how silly some of our gadgets really are. Today I caught her routine dealing with the George Foreman grill. I know it well. I bought 2. Slightly used at a discount price but the brand was on the box. I think one of them is with one of my sons although I cannot say whether or not he ever takes it out-of-the-box. Anyhow the comedy routine was dealing with the design flaws in this gadget. There are many. If you would like to have grill marks in your hand this is the perfect device. No way to use it safely but if you are hungry it might be the fastest way to a party Chard burger. Or a grilled cheese sandwich. One with the cheese has the consistency of flowing lava. The grill is hot and there is no way to change how hot that is. Other than counting down the seconds. We bought ours without knowing what it was. This was not something that had ever been advertised on TV locally. It’s not hard to learn how to use one plug it in put your food in press down on the cover until your hand is burning and then stop with any luck your burger or your grilled cheese will be done to perfection. And that was the point of the comedy routine. Although advice in the industry was available the company decided to forget about it and go with low cost. Let the buyer figure out all the other parts. I keep mine around just in case I ever need to destroy a sandwich or burger patty. I can clean up after the fact when things have cooled to a point where 3rd degree burns are no longer possible. I should check in with son #3 and see if he ever uses his. If not I will forward the video to him so he can be equally warrant. And if you think that you should read the instructions, there are not this was a device designed without objective other than keeping the cost low. As I said, I purchased 2 in a used goods store nearby. The perfect impulse purchase. Do I have birthday buyer’s remorse? No and most of my burn scars have faded overtime period.

I am guilty of overthinking certain situations. Not all of them but once in awhile I find myself wondering what led me down that path. Here is an example. Outside in the backyard at the top of pole there is an anemometer. I’ve had it in different locations for going on 20 years. A week ago we noticed collectively that the wind speed was no longer showing on the big wall gauge. And after a quick look outside even though the wind was blowing the anemometer was still. Oh no. Was it dead? Was it broken? Finding out would require some effort. Either taking down the pole which seemed like a lot of work or taking out a step ladder which seemed precarious. I mean if the wind is blowing and I can’t tell, do I want to climb a ladder. The snow might cushion my fall but I thought of another idea. I could send someone else up the pole. You know spread the work around. I figured out how to describe the repair to someone else and then we waited for a good winter day. Hint there is no sustain. Right now the schools are closed because of the most current storm. Anyhow at the point where we thought we had everything figured out and I knew exactly where to find the step ladder and how to find my way down into the field and put things in place and make a concerted safe effort to give the wind vane that little twitch I knew it needed, we looked outside. Guess what? The anemometer was turning in keeping with the wind and the gauge was showing the current wind speed almost as if it knew we were thinking about climbing up and giving it a tap. And now after seeing it work, I can put that problem away and move on to the next one. Probably it will involve something like deep snow which would have cushioned any fall I had from the step ladder if I carried on with my other plan period.

If you are of a certain age and your friends had musical tastes that were at least a bit eclectic, you can remember the pleasure of exploring their album collections. Unearthing gems that were virtually unknown to you depending upon your background. It kept us all routing through the stacks because like I say you just never knew. Anyhow I still have those moments. Today I found something from the Zeppelin. That I had never listened to before. Nothing rare just coming from a time in my life when I had moved to other areas of the spectrum of music and I missed this one. And there’s still a pleasure in putting together the pieces of the puzzle. Recognizing familiar voices or familiar riffs even though the music was recorded a lifetime ago. I am sure there are many more moments like this now that the library of the world is available to us. I have not gone through a personal album collection in many years. Most of us no longer have one. And a Spotify stack doesn’t carry the same weight. Anyhow I can confirm that when you are a world class musician you turn out world class music year after year. Unless you are a one hit wonder. I think it’s great that despite the number of years that have gone by the tombs still hold up. Did I mention world class musicians? I shall because those who had careers spanning a lifetime had more than one tune in their back pocket. And the good old days to have made it to an LP meant that someone else believed in you.

Here we go. A little more of my work history. I am digging deep on this one going back to one of my very first jobs. As a trophy I still have my name tag. One of those ones created using a plastic label maker. It fit well with the job. I was hired by the nearest supermarket just across the back fence to pack groceries. No experience necessary just a willingness to get in and out of peoples cars. Curves were larger back then. I thought I was doing well. I had learned right off the bat to put the heavy cans at the bottom of the bags and the squishy stuff on top. That is how it’s supposed to work right? But I can also do simple math and I figured out after only a matter of days that I was not getting the same number of shifts as my coworkers. I was a little kid with a little paycheck. And I had to figure out why. It turns out that I was hired to hide a common secret in retail. One of the other people, hired exactly the same day as me, was the son of the store manager. One of those little details that you cannot beat when it comes to looking for the best deal in the business. He got the hours and I got to go home with my name tag. The economy was good back then and it did not take long for me to find a better job that paid more money with a chance to stay around for more than a few days. The only downside was that I had to walk a little further to work. Having your employment just across the back fence is nice. And in future I learned to look at who was being hired with me. Does it matter in the long run? No, not really, this was not a job with long term opportunity. And I did get to keep my name tag which is worth something in the nostalgia business period.

The ability to create a playlist of songs from a very early part of your life reflects on our ability to find music from a long time ago. I do not care about your age whether you were 10 or 50 what you think of as a long time ago is exactly that. From a far distant past. So here’s the test. When you choose a selection of songs from whatever the year do they still bring you pleasure? Not just the beat. Not just the lyrics. When you hear a given tune are you brought back to a different time. Perhaps when life was simpler. Think about it. You can now relive the best times of being a teenager or being deep into your studies in college or playing with a new family. The music does that for you in a way that a book will not. I happened upon an album from when I was still in high school. No need to name the artist. Just take it from me. The songs still work. The musician knew what was going on. And I realized I can come back to this playlist years from now and I will probably find a similar reaction on my part. Music is timeless. There are many things that we can no longer do. A factor of age and location. But the tunes? They hold the same level of importance. So, if you find yourself skipping along take that as the ultimate round of applause for the musician their effort is still working for you. I suppose a great artistic masterpiece can have similar qualities but the tunes are the simplest way to start up your own time machine and head back to earlier. Try not to sing too loudly. Remember that others have their own personal soundtracks and you were probably not part of it then or now. Just a hint.

This is the time of the year, locally when Community Schools look for clientele. They offer up a list of courses that are supposed to attract the local population into spending an hour or two each week in a church basement. And I have to point out that there’s a supply and demand involved here. You need people who understand a particular craft to teach it to others. So many things that were given in the time of my grandparents are no longer considered as possibilities. I would love to learn how to hitch up the team take the cards to town. Or make a batch of moonshine out in the back building. Or even cut down a number of trees and drag them out of the woods. Instead we get crafts like making a blanket using yarn. I wonder if anyone has thought of showing people like me how to make a proper batch of gingerbread cookies. My grandmother knew such things. Possibly my mother. One or two of my siblings maybe. But me I have never learned to make a proper gingerbread cookie. Think how much better the world would be. Or, how to go and get a bag of oats and turn that into oatmeal. There must be instructions somewheres. I can see spending weeks taking my oats and turning them into whatever it is you use to make oatmeal. You see. I have so much left to learn. And as for those trees, I do know how to cut down a tree but getting it out of the woods would be very tricky do dragon fully pointy end or the square end? I’m sure I could come up with other questions that would make any instructor laugh, for the rest of the season. But I will be smarter when all is said and done.

I’m going to start with a disclaimer. A spoiler alert in some ways. I have never been to jail, other than a visit to historical site how was dinner gallery. Hardly counts. Here, in Canada we have a certain number of prisons that are famous. For all the wrong reasons. And we shadow, rather are overshadowed, by our neighbours to the South. They have some really big names. Ones that have had whole movies. Alcatraz, Leavenworth, sing sing. Dots on a very large map. Turns out most of what we know about these prisons has been coloured by Hollywood. I’m left to wonder whether it is worth my time to try and learn more. I mean, give him my intention to avoid ever going there either as a visitor or an inmate. What I really want to have is a basic knowledge of what made these places so infamous. Probably I do not want to know. Can I have the cartoon version, please. Or maybe go on a drive on the highway going by and look across and say to myself oh so that’s where that place is. Do any of them have passenger rail service? That could be a fun way to tour. Probably not, so I will go back to watching video. They give me all the wrong information. Maybe I would like a cartoon version. A name like sing sing invites a song, does it not? Better than I put my time into studying local history. We turned our most famous jail into a pizza joint. We had good food and good people.

We have been warned. Too much time and we will start looking for ways to do things. Without due reflection. I have fallen back down into that tunnel of rabbit holes that leads people to search for who they are. What used to be a simple exercise of asking others and going through old parish records now has a new friend. Science. Where you pay a small fee and spit in a tube in a couple of weeks you learn who your cousins are. Or maybe not. Now I have spent the better part of my life trying to figure out my tree. I have done a decent job and I realize just how much our privacy depends upon other people not digging too deeply around that tree. And so now I’m caught with a conundrum. I do not figure that I would learn anything of great value by having my test done. But I am one part of a larger puzzle at anytime you make yourself visible you give up the privacy of others. I know, we are all told that we are unique. So be it. But I have a bunch of siblings and a larger group of cousins an even larger group of relatives. Anytime I give up my identity I also compromise there’s. And I am too lazy to go and contact each one that I know of and ask for their accordance. So I hesitate. What is the price of increased knowledge? You see, when you get into this game you give away clues to your identity. And what you make public might be what someone else has been trying to keep hidden from the greater world. I think I will sit and ponder and then I will ask a few friends. And relatives. Just to test the prevailing wind. Do they care if the world knows who their grandparents and great grandparents are. I have the receipts. I have done my research with diligence. And if I tell my first cousin that his or her great grandparents are so and so I do so with a fair degree of confidence but they may not want that information to be so easily available in some ways I am the keeper of the keys to a great chest of knowledge. Each detail in and of itself is very minor but when you consolidate the data you end up with something larger. Monolithic.

If you have ever gone and even more than you should at the buffet in a restaurant, it may mean that you are as old as me. Or that you’ve gone to Vegas. Or both. When you do the math, your buffet meal is probably still running as a profit for the restaurant. We get confused by prices on the menu. Thinking that they reflect the reality of the cost involved. They do not. No restaurant is going to open itself up to the risks of bankruptcy by giving someone all the chicken wings they can eat. I learned that from a video. Moving right along. Oh, wait. If I had an all you can eat buffet nearby I would probably put down my dollars the same way. That big basket of wings. Or unlimited bacon slices. Please, do not pretend that this is good nutrition. For that we have other chain restaurants. I did learn that the McDonald’s filet of fish is not as bad as all that. A managed portion of carefully sourced protein. If we still had Friday diet laws in place this would be somewheres where you get your fish on Friday done without any pain. I have been watching a series of videos about the hidden side of the food industry. I tend to favor coffee beans that I grind myself but for those of you who buy a bag of ground coffee it was superstore beware. There are a lot of filler items they will make that pound of coffee go further. Probably not ground acorns all that was used in the past. Look up the term ersatz for other information

There’s so much I still need to learn. I have been eating food for all of my life and I have my own vocabulary for what I know, but I cannot begin to describe what is around me. I’ve learned that everything I ever knew about Curry is probably wrong. Not the taste. Not the colour. Rather the complexity. You see when I was younger I found it quite mysterious the spices made the world go round. Like most homes we have a small rack of glass jars with labels that told me absolutely nothing about what was inside. My person go to with salt. It was only after I had a family that I tried making my own Curry dish. Based entirely upon commercial jars that mimic the real complexity of the spice mix. I knew that it came in different colours but beyond that nothing. Today watching a video which is how I get most of my information now I learned that Curry is a name that covers something as broad as colour. There are many Currys and each one comes with its own set of flavours. I guess I’m going back to learning. Back to making small batches of Stew with different spice mixes to see if I can unlock a little what others around the world do. Will I know if I get it right? No. I will pass on what I learn to those in my family who might be interested and then I will go back to stiring and tasting in the hopes of trying to understand a subject as broad as the world is large. Salt, my old friend, you will have to join the others in the spice rack and you are going to lose your predominance. As I say I still have a lifetime to catch up. I think that my meals might be better as a result. And if I happen into a restaurant that sells a Curry dish I will use that as a learning opportunity. Time for me to move beyond red and green as flavour descriptions