New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Showing posts with label Roger's Diary of the End Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roger's Diary of the End Times. Show all posts
Today was a momentous occasion for the Confidentials.
Diana had a dental appointment in Louisville, and I drove her through the war-torn city and back. It was the first time in more than five months that either of us had gone to Kentucky.
Apart from typically dangerous drivers prompting evasive action, we managed to avoid the dreaded terrorists.
Dupont Circle is just a stone's throw from Lexington Road, and so we made a $60 stop at Lotsa Pasta on the way home: muffaletta sandwiches, Teli Hungarian-style salami, goat emmentaler cheese, herring in dill, German dark chocolate biscuits, ciabatta, and a major haul of Mackay's three fruit marmalade.
Gracious. It might well be the closest we get to Europe this year, although I suppose strictly speaking the sandwiches are a New Orleans kind of thing.
At the start of the year I was looking for ways to shake up this blog, partly because I'd vowed to embark upon a sabbatical of sorts from direct and time-consuming involvement in local politics, but also from a sobering realization that ruts are real.
The "sober" part didn't last very long.
As explained on several occasions, time constraints also became more of a factor, which was a good problem to have. Two part-time jobs add up to a whole; both Pints&union and Food & Dining Magazine pay me actual money, which is something this blog has not ever done in 15.5 years of operation.
Having lowered my daily quota of posts from four to three, and now to two, it seemed like a good idea to have regular topics.
Monday ... Roger's Diary of the End Times Tuesday ... Beer with a Socialist Wednesday ... Shane's Excellent New Words Thursday ... On the Avenues Friday ... Green Mouse Presents Nawbany Week in Review
It was (and remains) my hope to do food on Saturday and music on Sunday. These will happen, although I'm not sure when.
You'll have noticed the strikethrough: Roger's Diary of the End Times. COVID-19 was the furthest thing from my mind when this idea came to me. Rather, it was inspired by designer ice cubes.
However, while the advent of our current coronavirus strain/drain might itself be a verifiable sign of the end times, it's tacky to make a direct reference to it, and so I'll drop it for a while unless a format change seems justified. It might.
Like everyone else without a template, I'm just waiting to see how it all shakes out.
Perhaps a lifetime in the better beer business informs my cynicism, or is it our proximity to the bourbon revolution in Kentucky?
My entire adult life has been dedicated to the proposition of enjoying the pleasures of alcoholic beverages in their time-honored sense -- namely, that they're alcoholic, and with alcohol comes a certain olfactory experience whether beer, wine or liquor.
So, why is everyone going soft with "hard" liquids designed expressly to not taste hard?
I may have answered my own question, and of course I realize that the "hard" revolution in indeterminate "soft" tasting alcoholic beverages (a) has always been with us (wine coolers, light beer, et al) and (b) owes to fundamental denial v.v. personal health; in short, a collection of numbers aimed at convincing drinkers that they can have it all.
Or: If kombucha is healthy for your gut, why corrode your gut with the alcohol "hard" kombucha contains?
And: Mass-produced vodka is odorless and tasteless. Couldn't you add your own tablespoon?
Each day I peruse social media in the morning, invigorated with the assurance that people can't possibly get any dumber.
By afternoon, I'm ready for some of that hard kombucha ... and could you hold the probiotics? Those give me a hangover.
New Albany's new $15 million city hall, which is taking far longer to complete than expected, is a genuine sign of the end times before we even begin to consider Jeff Gahan's gold-plated fixtures.
One thing's for sure: Deaf might be okay with losing the toilet race to some confusing Asian country of which he's blissfully unaware, BUT THAT HORRID POSEUR MIKE MOORE IS ANOTHER STORY ENTIRELY.
We can only hope the shipment of superior Japanese toilet technology eludes the coronavirus cordon.
I just got back from my first trip to Japan, and I'm now in love with the country. The ramen, yakitori and sushi. The gorgeous volcanoes. The fascinating people and culture. But of all the things I fell in love with, there's one that I can't stop thinking about: the toilets.
Japanese toilets are marvels of technological innovation. They have integrated bidets, which squirt water to clean your private parts. They have dryers and heated seats. They use water efficiently, clean themselves and deodorize the air, so bathrooms actually smell good. They have white noise machines, so you can fill your stall with the sound of rain for relaxation and privacy. Some even have built-in night lights and music players. It's all customizable and controlled by electronic buttons on a panel next to your seat.
There was a time when hereditary monarchies enforced the head of the family's whims by means a tad stronger than appearances with their attorneys in trademark court. Consider Henry VIII's six marriages. Of course no reason whatever remains for there to be any such thing as a hereditary monarchy (precedents exist for this sort of cleansing, too).
This brings us to the End Times Branding Department.
Sussexes say monarchy has no jurisdiction over use of word ‘royal’ overseas
The couple’s Instagram account uses the name SussexRoyal, as does a website they set up following their shock decision to stop carrying out official royal duties in favour of financial freedom. Both will have to be rebranded.
Maybe they need to consider guerrilla marketing.
In other news from the apocalypse's cusp, I posted a brief piece at Food & Dining Magazine about problems with food delivery services, which might be summarized thusly: The more you seek to make things easy for yourself, the harder things get for everyone else.
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ― Confucius
Where I live the options for food delivery used to be simple. Many pizza parlors did it, and maybe a few Chinese restaurants. These were the alternatives to going to the eatery itself to pick up your order, or if it got to be too late in the evening and driving wasn’t an option, tearing into your stash of emergency past-date sardines and stale Saltines.
(They pair well with beer, but I digress.)
These days amid the post-apocalyptic, neoliberally electronic, service-oriented economy, food delivery services have become ubiquitous, and so have issues arising from them. The evolution of these discussions can be confusing, to say the least ...
The compilation was released in 2005, but the songs go back decades. It might be considered the musical version of The Atomic Cafe, a seminal documentary from the 1980s. The film reintroduced Bert the Turtle's "duck and cover" strategy for surviving a nuclear blast.
Three bits from "Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security."
The world also was coming to an end during the Late Middle Ages, specifically the time of the Black Death. There's much written about the Black Death in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which remains an excellent introduction to the late medieval period. Not only that, but no discussion about the Black Death is complete without a reference to the Danse Macabre, a medieval allegory about the inevitability of death.
In the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, skeletons escort living humans to their graves in a lively waltz. Kings, knights, and commoners alike join in, conveying that regardless of status, wealth, or accomplishments in life, death comes for everyone. At a time when outbreaks of the Black Death and seemingly endless battles between France and England in the Hundred Years’ War left thousands of people dead, macabre images like the Dance of Death were a way to confront the ever-present prospect of mortality.
We'e developing our own ways of coping with impending doom. Sadly, several of these mechanisms involve television. Sorry, but as the end gets nearer, I'd rather be reading.
Art about the endings of things used to be the stuff of tragedy. But today’s creators are finding another way to make sense of ongoing crisis: through comedy.
Last week, The Washington Post published an article with a headline that blended, as so many headlines will these days, equal amounts of accuracy and alarmism. “‘Everything Is Not Going to Be Okay’: How to Live With Constant Reminders That the Earth Is in Trouble” is a blunt summary of a subtle work of journalism—a timely and lyrical exploration of climate change not just as a physical fact, but also as a psychical one. How does it feel, the writer Dan Zak asks, to live within looming tragedy? What does it mean to run errands and pay mortgages and pick up the kids from school, to hew to the established rhythms of things, as the world gives way to entropy? What is it like to exist in a place where extinction is a matter not of speculative fiction, but of daily journalism? Every age has its own conception of apocalypse. You can tell a lot about ours by the fact that this particular vision—endings that arrive not with a bang, but through a series of preventable whimpers—ran in the Style section.
The Post story, as it explored the banality of our not-okayness, cited the poet Alice Major’s Welcome to the Anthropocene (the book’s title is a reference to the current geologic age, the one in which human activity is the dominant influence on the Earth’s physical environment). Her work, art that reckons with science, is part of a long tradition. In 1965, as the world attempted to make its rough peace with the fact that it could all be destroyed in an instant, the British literary theorist Frank Kermode delivered a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr College. “The Long Perspectives,” as he called the talks, were meditations on how literature, from antiquity to the mid–20th century, had doubled as an attempt to organize time itself. In 1967, Kermode compiled the lectures into a book, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction ...
Conniving censorial and prohibitionist local do-gooders might continue to drag me into the fray now and then, kicking and screaming (but always factual), but my stated goal is to devote my sabbatical to exploring other nooks in the periphery.
As Democrats and Republicans exhibit precisely the same behavior and expect (accurately) that we'll continue to choose one and reject the other, when their corruption is all-inclusive ... well, obviously we're living in the end times.
Last week it was designer ice for your high-end hootch. This week, just two small items relative to taste, or the absence of it.
Josh Noel writes about beer (and other beverages) for the Chicago Tribune. If you're interested in beer and you frequent the Twitter neighborhood, he's a good follow https://twitter.com/hopnotes. Noel reports the ongoing degradation of better beer's once bright promise.
It gets worse. My fellow males always have embraced cluelessness as a birthright, but who knew that Valentine's Day proposals at Olive Garden are a thing?
As legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel is reputed to have asked his woefully inept 1962 New York Mets, "Does anybody here know how to play this game?"
Addressing the latter, that'd be fancy ice made from filtered limestone water, cut via a band saw into different shapes and sizes, and available for use with premium spirits
... How should you have fun and practice “self-care” next to the end of the world? Certainly, consumerism isn’t the answer. But we pretend it is.
Every week I see my friends have fun (usually, but not always, via Instagram) by taking their friends out to fancy meals, buying tickets to hyped-up concerts, or travelling to distant lands. But when it all comes crashing down, we must ask ourselves: Was that hot pot dinner, that BTS concert, or that “life changing” trip to Japan worth it?
This question “Does consumption equals happiness?” is a vexing one for our times.
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