Blast from the past

Just for ducks, I’ve watched a couple of the TV movies of the 1980s Perry Mason reboot. I can’t say much about the plots, because when I use the term “watch” it really means “I have it on while I’m doing other stuff”.

However—the hairstyles and the shoulder pads. Holy crap!

Shades of Watergate

More than 40 years ago, my mother was glued to the TV during the Watergate hearings in the US Senate. That was pre-cable, so she probably was tuned to PBS, one of eight channels we got in LA at the time. I didn’t quite understand what the fascination was back then, but after following the appearance of Michael Cohen before the House Oversight Committee yesterday, I think I get it; maybe.

In my case, it’s not so much Cohen’s testimony about the criminal and repugnant activities of the current occupant of the White House. He didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know. It was the gobsmackingly rabid behavior of the Republicans on the committee. As Representative Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) pointed out—they have been running from the truth ever since they fell into line behind the Kleptocrat.

Lynch's Democratic colleague from Maryland, Jamie Raskin, clarified: They’re not outraged that Cohen has lied about Bonespurs in the past. They’re outraged because he’s not continuing to lie for him.

I wonder what Mom, a lifelong Republican, would make of that?

As little as an hour

Grocery stores have been delivering groceries since the days of horse-drawn wagons. Following World War II, at least in the US, we’d pretty well moved on to self-service, and I well remember my mom poring through Wednesday’s LA Times food section for sales and coupons to be deployed on Thursday. But then, maybe eight to ten years ago, the notion of ordering all your food online and having it delivered reshaped the whole landscape.

One of my neighbors in the Valley They Call Silicon had a regular delivery from Safeway; the driver had to schlepp crates of food up because my building had no elevator. Perhaps that’s precisely why my neighbor used the service.

These days there are multiple services, both supermarket-specific and just-in-general ones. There’s an app; of course there is.

Wegman’s, the New York-based chain, is one of the markets that will fill your order for pick-up or delivery. I often see their proxy shoppers using the app throughout the store. But recently I saw an entirely new take on the whole delivery schtick:

Now, that’s a service whose time has come.

One for the books

I think we all need this story:

When the owner of an independent bookshop in San Diego unexpectedly had to have open-heart surgery—with his wife in attendance at the hospital and their one employee out sick with the flu—people in the independent bookseller community kept the shop open for a week, until the sick employee was back.

They came from shops around San Diego, and from as far away as LA. To help a competitor. The customers never knew anything at all was wrong. 

And they’re still filling in while the owner’s recovering.

Book people, FTW.

Gratitude Monday: bills

Yesterday was bill-paying day. It was an extra-big one on account of paying the Amex bill that included the major work on the car last month, the Visa bill that included the invoice for last year’s tax prep and the annual extortion by the People’s Republic’s “association”. (I wouldn’t be so resentful about the last one if all residents of the place had to pay, but the massive high-rise developments that are bringing in thousands of well-heeled yuppies are exempt, so I’m basically subsidizing their use of the amenities.)

But as I lined up the electronics to pay them all (including Comcast, which I intend to trim back considerably), it occurred to me that I have the money for all of it, plus the final payment for the crown work I had done last year, and to get more needed repairs done to the car next month.

And even though I have a very uneasy relationship with financial things, I realized that it’s a matter for deep gratitude that I can pay my bills—even (within reason) the surprise ones. I consider the millions of federal workers and contractors who have taken serious and to some extent irremediable financial hits at the hands of the current administration, and I’m also grateful that I have enough (even in my anxious mindset) that I can make contributions to funds to help them out.

That’s a good Gratitude Monday.

Out of chances

Well, huh—Judge Amy Berman Jackson told the Babadook to STFU. She drove him through a series of obvious fabrications—no two of which were consistent—and then expanded her earlier gag order.

(This is a kind of gag to which Roger Stone is apparently not accustomed.)

Between Jackson and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the administration is starting to get schooled.

Out of the storm

We did indeed get a dump of snow yesterday. I soaked three pairs of socks during my various forays out to dig out the car (yeah, I shouldn’t have been wearing Crocs), and my feeders were quite appreciated by birds throughout the day.

The People’s Republic didn’t appear to get the freezing rain, which I hope holds. Weather’s meant to trend warmer until later in the week.

In the meantime—and apropos of pretty much nothing—here’s a shot of the veg display at Whole Foods. I just like what they did.

Storm rising

Here in the District They Call Columbia we’ve got dire predictions of a serious snow-plus-ice-plus-rain, starting in the very early hours of today. Virginia DOT trucks have already treated NoVa roads to a couple of passes of brine in preparation. Which—as I look out on my back yard under an inch and with huge flakes dropping more—turns out to have been a good idea.

My cluster parking lot has still not been plowed, though, so I'm not getting out.

Being a fourth-generation Californian, I wig out some when I hear these sorts of forecasts. So yesterday when I got in to work, I checked it out on WaPo. Why, yes indeedy—here are the visuals from around 0700:

Snow:

Then ice:

I also cast my eye over the comments and I was glad I was the only person around when I saw this:

Because welcome to the District.

Not info overload

Three years ago, as part of a company-wide “transformation initiative”, I took part in a Potemkin Village exercise involving tiger teams supposedly working toward building strategies in three new areas.

My focus was on “internal communications”, a much-needed function. (Although, tbf, most organizations are completely crap at this.) My team and I spent about 6X the amount of time we were told to commit to the project, and presented recommendations for implementing employee communications—hiring a director, comprehensive framework for multiple touch points, comms calendar, the whole megillah.

That was before executive management decided that we really didn’t need no stinkin’ transformation. There was quite the bun fight over who should control such a function; the (now-departed) HR director insisted we didn’t need to hire anyone—we could use existing resources. But in any case, HR should own the operation. Yeah, right.

Eventually they assigned the job (not at the director level) to someone in the executive office, put up a monitor with HR announcements in the lobby and reduced the amount of information shared throughout the company by an order of magnitude. Problem solved, eh?

Well, aside from various emails from HR and whatever goes on that lobby monitor that I don’t even notice, the most frequent form of communication we’ve received has been photocopied announcements of various lectures and panels taped to elevator walls.

Until a few weeks ago, when one of these appeared in each car:

I suppose that tape wasn’t good for marble walls. Or maybe someone decided that taped flyers looked tacky. Or maybe they just felt there was too much communication going on.

Gratitude Monday: raising the dough

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had was made by my hotel in Berlin last November. So I’ve been thinking about pizza on and off ever since. The People’s Republic does not overflow with excellent pizza, and I don’t care how efficient your delivery people are, by the time it gets to your door, the bloom is off.

So I started to make my own. Turns out that you can get pizza dough in most supermarkets, and—since I like Pizza Margherita—it’s fairly easy to put one of those together. I bought the pizza stone my friend recommended (although, tbh, I’ve got very nice crust on a cookie sheet, so it’s not clear to me that this $27 was the best expenditure; also—how do you get the burnt cheese and tomato sauce off of it?), and bread flour and yeast, but I’d been dancing around the notion of making my own dough, partly because I do not have a history of success with yeast.

So yesterday I screwed my courage to the sticking point and followed the recipe my friend uses. I had a pound of dough from Trader Joe’s for backup, but it turns out that my effort was fine. I made pizza bianca (three types of cheese):

(Yes, I haven't quite mastered the round part.)

And topped it with insalata:

It was delicious, with a slurp of Pinot Gris:

And this is what I’m grateful for today—thanks to the encouragement, recipe and guidance of my friend Heather, I can make pizza dough. Also—I froze ¾ of the dough, so I can have pizza basically whenever I like.