The Korea Ploy

Trump is already trumpeting his success with North Korea, although nothing much has happened besides the leaders of North and South Korea meeting briefly. I’m not without my doubts about this process but I hope he succeeds.

However, I thought he was elected to “Make America Great Again,” not to “Make Korea Great Again”. I fail to see how denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, or even reuniting the two Koreas, is going to help create jobs in America, or reopen shuttered factories, or build infrastructure, or keep our borders secure, or any of the things Trump promised he would do to make America great again.

I hope he succeeds in Korea because it would be a great thing for the Korean people. But Donald, keep your eye on the ball. You’re supposed to be doing great things for the American people.

Major Munch

I was typing an article at my computer. A nearby TV was on and the national news was being aired but I was halfway listening and not giving it my full attention. Then I heard the journalist talking about a steak dinner that Trump is giving the president of France. The journalist rambled on and on about this steak dinner, so I figured these steaks must be very special steaks made from very special cows.

I imagined the cows being hand-fed pink cotton candy, drinking champaign, and being given daily massages. (I understand there are such cows in Japan.) But then the journalist reported that Trump’s wife, Melania, is preparing the steak dinner. I didn’t realize Melania was such a good a cook that she could prepare steak dinners for visiting heads of state. But it must be true — the news media doesn’t lie. Either Melania is a hell of a cook or the French president is going to be very disappointed.

I resumed typing my article but a nagging thought persisted. After a while I knew what it was. Was it possible, I wondered, that the journalist had been talking about a state dinner? Oh well, that’s different. Never mind.

Leftovers

My amigo and fellow blogger CyberDave sent me a link to a website called Supercook. It has a search function that allows one to input whatever leftovers are in the fridge and it will return a recipe that uses those leftovers. Sounds like a handy tool to have in the kitchen.

I'm sure there are people with leftovers on hand. I'm not one of them. My usual meal procedure is: go to the store and buy enough simple food for today and two or three more days. Like hotdogs and buns. Hamburgers and buns. BBQ and and coleslaw. Frozen french fries. Prepared salads. If I’m feeling very ambitious, I might buy fixin's for Chinese fried rice or southwestern chili with beans.

Supercook also allows you to enter categories of leftovers. In my case, those would be:

• Spoiled.
• Eat it today or throw it out.
• What is that green stuff?
• Doesn’t this last forever?

Of course, there is the condiment category: mustard, ketchup, mayo, pickle relish. But can you make a meal out of condiments? Probably not.

If you throw out a lot of leftovers, here are a few ways you can use them and save money: Creative ways to use leftovers.

I have to go now. The tornado siren across the street is wailing its warning. Severe weather is imminent — high wind and possible tornadoes. Usually, blowing the siren keeps them away. If this page turns out to be my last post, people can say, “He died at the keyboard, his finger on the mouse button.”

The Wendy’s Experience - Again

It was suppertime and I had a desire for a fish sandwich. So I drove to Wendy’s and went inside to order a fish sandwich. The manager walked over to the register where orders are placed.

"I'd like a fish sandwich."

"We got rid of the fish sandwich." He walked away, I assume to do some manager-stuff, which doesn’t include dealing with lowly customers.

An older woman came to the register. I ordered my second choice.

"I'd like a spicy chicken sandwich."

"You can mumble mumble mumble," she replied.

"What?"

"You can mumble mumble mumble," she said again.

"I can what?"

"Mumble mumble mumble."

I had no clue what she was saying, and she was making no effort to speak louder or more clearly, so I said, "Just give me a spicy chicken sandwich." I hoped they still sold it.

A young lady in back, one of the cooks, shouted, "It's going to be six minutes."

The woman at the register said to me, "It's going to be six minutes. Is that okay?"

"That's okay," I replied. At least it would be hot. "And small fries and a small drink."

"Is that all?" she asked.

"You can throw in whatever discount you give to geezers."

"We got rid of the senior discount."

"Okay." I paid and sat at a nearby table.

I waited for my meal. Eventually it arrived and I walked to the condiments table to get ketchup. The first ketchup pump I tried was out of ketchup. I moved to the second ketchup pump. It was out of ketchup, too. I wasn’t surprised. That’s a part of the Wendy’s experience, at this Wendy’s.

I sat at a table and looked around. This was the evening-meal time of day.

This Wendy’s is on the “main drag” through town. US highways 1 and 301, both of which are major north-south highways, run jointly past the restaurant 50 feet from their door. You couldn’t ask for a better location for a restaurant. And this is the dinner hour on a Saturday night.

I only came here because I wanted a fish sandwich and I knew McDonald’s would be crowded. But crowded or not, the next time I want fast food I’ll go to McDonald’s — like everyone else.

Say Cheese!

April 12 is National Grilled Cheese Day. A local television station, WTVR, posted an interview with Spencer Young, who operates a food truck. He shows his method of making a grilled cheese sandwich. Caution: viewing this video may cause a strong craving for a homemade grilled cheese sandwich.

If that video doesn’t float your boat, you might enjoy watching Grace of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals make an Apple-Pepper Jelly-Cheddar grilled cheese sandwich. Honestly, I think this video scores even higher on the yummy meter.

Who You Callin’ Cisgender?

Ever heard the word cisgender? (Sometimes it’s abbreviated cis.) I’ve seen it and never bothered to look it up until today. It must be a word that was invented in recent years. Here is what it means, according to Google:

Cisgender is a term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth.

Wait, what? I was assigned a sex at birth? I thought I was born a baby boy. I admit to not giving it a lot of thought, but I thought a baby boy would be kind of obvious, especially with the whole circumcision thing. Now it seems there may be something fishy going on. A vision of my hospital’s delivery room pops into my mind.

Doctor: “What should we make this baby — a boy or a girl?”

Nurse: “We made the last one a girl so let’s make this one a boy.”

Doctor: “Okay. Put the baby into the gender assignment machine and make sure it’s set to boy.”

Nurse: “Will do, doctor. Turning the machine on now.”

Machine: nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-Waaaaahhhh!!!-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh…

Nurse: “Here you go, doctor. A brand new baby boy. Turning the machine off now.”

Machine: Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuuuuuuhhhhh………

And just like that, a new baby boy is born. Excuse me, I meant to say assigned. Welcome to modern times.

Burger Fail

I decided to eat supper, so I cooked some meatballs. The problem is, they were not supposed to be meatballs. They were supposed to be hamburgers.

They were “largish” meatballs, to be sure, and they were slightly flattened. But whatever you call them, they were far closer to meatballs than burger patties.

I’ve blogged about my cooking prowess (or lack thereof) before. There is almost no kind of food or recipe that can resist my screwing it up. But burgers are so simple to cook that it’s very dismaying to screw them up. It’s like failing at the task of making water boil.

The burger patties shrunk significantly in the horizontal direction and swelled significantly in the vertical direction. How do hamburger patties know up-down from side-to-side? They must, because I’ve never seen a burger patty swell in diameter while becoming thinner and thinner. Those patties know what they’re doing.

As I cooked the beef patties, I splashed them with liquid smoke. Each time I turned the patties over, I splashed on more liquid smoke. Finally I turned off the heat and put one of the little brown golf ball size meatballs on my plate. (It was far too small for a hamburger bun, and besides, I apparently forgot to buy buns when I bought the ground beef.) I cut off a small piece of burger and tasted it. It didn’t have any smoke flavor at all. Also, after 20 minutes of frying over medium heat, the meat was still raw on the inside. In case you think my stovetop is miscalibrated and medium heat is really low heat, then let me add that hundreds of droplets of grease were spattered across all surfaces within 3 feet of the frying pan: the stovetop, the countertop, the floor, the wall, me.

Mopping the kitchen floor and painting the walls is too high a price to pay for a hamburger. In the future, I’ll stick with Mickey D.

Walmart Fail

My trips to Walmart are usually mundane. I shop, I pay, I leave. Yesterday there was a hiccup in that normally smooth procedure.

It began in the produce department. I wanted to buy russet baking potatoes but the bin was very picked over. Only a few small spuds remained. I asked a stock clerk if there were more potatoes stashed in the back but there weren’t. So he grabbed a 10-pound bag of russet potatoes from another bin, opened the bag, and dumped the potatoes into the loose-potato bin. I thought, “That is great customer service! Simple problem, simple solution.”

As the stock clerk walked away, he said, “If you need more, just open another bag.” So I did. Mistake #1.

I looked for a trash can to dispose of the bag, but I didn’t see one. Not wanting to litter, I stuck the bag in my pocket with the intention of disposing of it at the checkout. Mistake #2.

I put all my groceries on the checkout belt followed by the wadded-up bag that had held the potatoes. After ringing up my groceries, the checkout clerk (her name tag said ‘Katherine’) saw the wadded up bag and hesitated. “It’s trash,” I told her. She un-wadded the bag and examined it. “Did your potatoes come from this bag?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t ring up your potatoes if they came from this bag.”

“The loose potato bin was empty,” I explained, “so the produce man told me to open a bag of potatoes and take what I needed.”

“He can’t do that,” Katherine replied. “I don’t know what he was thinking. I can’t ring up these potatoes if they’re from a bag.”

That initiated a long and lively discussion between Katherine, another cashier, and me. Here’s how I saw it: The store has potatoes and I have money, so let’s swap. Tell me the price and I’ll pay it. Let me pay what I owe and leave the store. Don’t quibble about loose potatoes and bagged potatoes. If I want to talk to a rule-bound nitpicker, I can always find a government bureaucrat.

Finally Katherine said flatly, “I can’t sell you these potatoes. It’s against the rules.”

Katharine won. I left Walmart without the potatoes. But what did the cashier think would be done with those potatoes? They can’t be put back into a sealed bag. They will be put into the loose potato bin. Instead of selling them to me, the store will sell them to another customer for the same price I would have paid. Nothing was accomplished except for wasting everyone’s time and persuading me to take my future business to a store where logic prevails and customer service is important.

Why do so many employees have difficulty with the concept of customer service? A business goes to a lot of effort to build good will with its customers and then a single unnecessary incident destroys that good will. I don’t dislike Walmart, but I dislike the experience I had there. Ironically, I didn’t even care what the potatoes were going to cost. I simply wanted to pay and leave. But the rules wouldn’t allow that.

Today I stopped in a Publix store and bought the potatoes I had tried to buy from Walmart. Publix is closer to my home. It’s a large, attractive store and the employees are friendly and helpful. Best of all, I was allowed to leave the store with my purchase. I intend to shop there more often.

Homicide Groupies

I went to bed, went to sleep, woke up, could not get back to sleep, and turned on the TV. The 1961 film The Ten Commandments was playing. I watched 5 minutes of it before I had to turn it off due to excessive over-acting. But during those 5 minutes, Moses (played by Charlton Heston) made this statement: "I am a stranger in a strange land."

That phrase took me instantly to the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. The novel is excellent. In 2012, the US Library of Congress named it one of 88 “Books that Shaped America”.

It is no coincidence that a line from a movie is also the title of an unrelated novel. Both are taken from the Old Testament, Exodus 2:22.

And she bore him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

The novel's protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, shared some aspects of his life with that of Moses. He was, like Moses, a stranger in a strange land.

Having mused upon these facts, I turned to the Internet to browse the news and I came upon this tweet.

Parkland shooting suspect getting fan mail, money from supporters: report https://t.co/dYIFQzNQ9H pic.twitter.com/T0N8QvJtMn

— The Hill (@thehill) March 29, 2018

Fan mail. Money. Photos of women and teens wearing lingerie. Letters and photos from all over the world. I don’t understand it.

Indeed, there are times when I, too, feel like I am a “stranger in a strange land”. There are times when I feel like an alien sent to Earth to observe humans in all their variety and vagaries, their notions, their whims, their foolishness. I observe but often don’t understand. Why would any human admire a person who killed 17 young people in cold blood and wounded another 14?

I don’t know, but I’ll take a guess at the answer. There are different degrees of broken. Some people are very broken and some people are a little broken. With 7 billion people on our planet, there must be very many people who are a little broken. Those people can be fixed or at least be shown compassion. Very broken people — like mass shooters — cannot be fixed. They need to be sent back to the factory. I’m sure there are many people who would pay the postage.