Dealing with personal failure is one of the great struggles of growing up. When we are young, the possibilities seem without limit, but as the years pass, we face every manner of barrier that causes us to be all too aware that we face a world with many constraints, many of them due to the limits of the temporal world but also, we must admit, many of them due to our own inadequacies.
I know it’s not Father’s Day but I can’t help thinking about him anyway. He was really crazy in a wonderful sort of way. Where to start? Oh, let’s talk about money. For years he directed music at our family’s church. He was outstanding. He was a composer too. He once wrote a full-blown cantata about the history of this particular church, complete with songs about its founding and development. It was darn good.
Somehow people doubt that this is true, but it is a fact: I was a professional chef with a highly regarded firm that served exotic meats such as elephant, giraffe, snake.
So who better to take advantage of the remarkable new availability of exotic meats online? True, there is a challenge here. I’ve never made Yak, Boar, Elk, or Kangaroo. But the site provides cooking tips, and I do have the benefit of my vast experience.
So it happened this way.
In Purgatory, there probably aren’t any garbage disposals. People there will have to scrape all food remains into the trash, and if so much as an onion bit gets into the drain, it will have to be carefully fished out before the water is turned on, lest the drain clog.
Every evening was a magic evening in the household of Mrs. Rede, who lived across the street and made fresh flour tortillas for dinner every day, in her kitchen that smelled of cumin and peppers, and in which hung a captivating Aztec calendar that enticed me with pagan charms.
There was no rolling pin anywhere in sight. She would mix up the ingredients (recipe? What recipe?) and let them rest in a bowl in the shape of balls.
Based on correspondence from this piece on kids and the web, the number-one issue that makes parents reluctant about the web is its red-light district. Well, let me cut to the chase: K9webprotection is a free program that solves the problem, and better than any of the others I’ve tried.
A household with computers and kids has no excuse not to download this right now. In fact, anyone with a computer who has no interest in visiting you-know-what kind of sites needs this program right now.
Remember those silly days in the 1990s, when Clinton, Gore, and their friends cobbled together our money to put computers in every classroom and community center? The hope was that the computer would at last do what the government has so far been unable to do after a century of work: make every child literate and high-minded. It turned out that most of the new computers gathered dust and became obsolete.
I’m trying to order a hamburger, medium well, but the cook was involved in heated argument with the customer who was insisting that DSL is better and faster than cable for a home internet connection.
“Man, DSL rocks!”
“You are crazy. DSL ain’t nothing. Cable’s bandwidth rocks!”
“You are paying for nothing. You can’t download nothing on cable!”
And so on.
Look, I’m the last guy to trash a consumer product. I’m disinclined to blast the manufacturers of a beloved bathroom gel as deceivers who make money off people’s ignorance and perpetuate the problem they are supposedly solving, or charlatans who deliberately hook people on some chemically produced gunk solely for the sake of profiting from repeated uses.
But someone has to say it: shaving cream is a racket.
