blake_logan

I wore the Munsingwear Kangaroo Pouch boxer briefs when they first came out, then the Jockey Horizontal fly boxer briefs. A few years ago, I saw a short film on the internet about Tommy John "adjustment free" underwear. It is the kind of thing you find here in the "Make Us Laugh" thread. It showed a series of everyday, ordinary men trying to adjust themselves in public without sticking their hands down their pants. The gyrations were hilarious. Then they switch to a fitness model doing yoga/dance moves wearing Tommy John boxer briefs and guarantee that they'd never bunch, sag, ride up or form a wedgie. Well, I just had to go to the website to check them out. I was shocked at how expensive they are and decided to stick with the Jockeys (you can get 4 Jockey boxer briefs for what 1 costs at Tommy John), even though they tended to sag sometimes. Perhaps the "freeballers" in this discussion have never had this experience, but a few days later I suffered excruciating pain after accidentally sitting on my "danglie bits" (which tend to get danglier as you age 😉) as I climbed up into the driver's seat of my truck. At that point, I decided I could do with a little more support than I was getting from the Jockey's, bit the bullet and tried out a pair of Tommy Johns. I was hooked and decided they were worth every penny. Now every year on the Black Friday sales I stock up on their second skin boxer briefs. And yes they have a horizontal fly, but it's too close to the waistband to be useful. Here's a link to the closest to the original ad I can find: https://youtu.be/o7vUqAvJ-S0 It's good for a laugh! I'm not trying to sell a product...just passing along what I think is an amusing anecdote.

not to mention the two Mannheim Steamroller Halloween albums.

Outdoors? In the summer? Don't be silly. Air Conditioning is your friend.

I find that every episode of Letterkenny is good for at least two belly laughs. I enjoyed Outlander until the story moved to North Carolina and the writers started taking too many liberties with the geography. Actually, they probably did it all along, but I didn't notice until it got close to home. I still watch it, but mostly to pick the flaws...like how Frasier's Ridge is covered with Spanish Moss, a plant which only grows in subtropical areas along the coast at least 300 miles from the purported location in the Blue Ridge mountains 😬 or how they could travel by horse drawn coach over dirt roads from Wilmington to Governor Tryon's Palace in New Bern as a day trip for a party when today the the journey takes at least 2 hours driving on interstate highways with 70 mph speed limits.

I went through the last series of Letterkenny in one sitting. In the middle of the final season of Vikings now. Most recent season of Fargo is next on the queue.

Well crap! I logged into Netflix last night and found that there were only 3 new episodes (I was hoping for 6-8), so my Black Mirror fix only lasted a little over 3 hours last night. I've enjoyed all the stories, but my favorites were all in Season 3: "Hated in the Nation", Shut Up and Dance" and "San Junipero".

Black Mirror is one of my favorites. I was really pleased this morning to learn the new series has been released. The only thing I'm not wild about is I'll be through the entire series in the next 48 hours or so, then I have to wait a year for the next round of stories 🙁.

Nothing like a Griswold Christmas, but last year I did a double feature with Home Alone & Home Alone 2.

I fell for the TV ads and bought a Dyson upright on sale at Best Buy several years ago. It really sucked (which is usually a good thing for vacuum cleaners) but it didn't do a very good job of cleaning dog hair from my carpets. The water tank vacuum is probably a Rainbow. The only way to get one is to have a salesman come to your home and do a demo. Back in 1980, one of my students had just started as a part time salesman and I agreed to have him come over to do the demo so he could practice his sales pitch. He vacuumed once over about a square yard of carpet and the clear water that he'd used to fill the tank had turned into sludge when he emptied it out. I didn't have $1000 to spend on a vacuum cleaner at the time or I would have probably gotten one. No way I'd spend $2500 today.

I watched three documentaries on Sunday. One was really good, one was kind of OK and one left me feeling "why did I waste my time on that". It turned out to be more like an infomercial than a documentary, so finding a documentary film that's worth waching can be a challenge. The Full Frame Film Festival shows an outstanding selection of documentary films each year. The archive section on the website lists all the films they've shown for the past 20 years. Find something there that peaks your interest then search for it on Netflix (or other streaming video sources). Maybe you'll get lucky.

The guy with the tambourine looks like he's really having a lot of fun!

My favorite sacred song: My favorite humorous song:

I generally end up skimming (or skipping over) "stream of consciousness" narrations. I don't need to know the menu for every meal or what designer label is on the clothes the character is wearing every time they change. If it doesn't contribute to the progress of the story, leave it out.

Just in time for Halloween.

My go to cake these days is the Smitten Kitchen's recipe for Chocolate Stout Cake. I use Highland Brewing Black Mocha Stout, but any chocolaty stout should work. It's really quick to mix up.

If you can find it, Grannick's Bitter Apple might help with the chewing. My first Labrador puppy was a chewer. I ended up spraying this stuff on furniture, clothes in the laundry basket & myself. The only thing he would still chew after it was treated were my smelly running shoes.

Google "flavored whiskey" and hold on to your seat. I'm guessing that some of them are inspired by liqueurs (e.g. Drambuie or Southern Comfort) while cutting back on the sweetness. Others are just trying to be trendy.

Where I live, barbecue is a noun, not a verb or an adjective. Pork shoulders &/or whole hogs are slowly roasted over a pit of hardwood coals (preferable hickory) until it's falling off the bone tender. Then it's pulled or sliced, optionally chopped, then seasoned with a sauce made of vinegar, water, salt, black pepper & red pepper. In some parts of the state they add a little tomato ketchup and some sugar to the sauce. The result is barbecue. It's always served with cole slaw (either red or white). Corn bread &/or hush puppies (deep fried balls of cornbread preferably including minced onion) are almost always served unless the barbecue and cole slaw are served as a sandwich on a hamburger bun. Acceptable accompaniments include fried chicken, chicken & pastry, boiled potatoes, potato salad, french fries, tater tots, green beans, baked beans, butter beans, collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, sweet corn, fried okra, cucumber & onion salad, scalloped tomatoes, sliced tomatoes, fried green tomatoes and Brunswick stew. Dessert is usually banana pudding. Barbecue is generally eaten at a restaurant that specializes in barbecue or from the catering menu at a big party (takes a lot of people to eat a whole hog ), but it is possible to produce an acceptable version at home. Pork shoulder roasted for 6-8 hours at 250 F. degrees then seasoned with sauce including liquid smoke is pretty good. If prepared outside in a smoker you don't need to add liquid smoke to the sauce. When I'm grilling, it's usually beef (fajitas is a favorite) or chicken (I've got a recipe that makes a reasonable approximation of Nando's Peri-Peri chicken).

CSA = Community Supported Agriculture At the beginning of the growing season, you enter into an agreement with a farmer to purchase a share of their harvest. The details of the agreement vary from farmer to farmer. Some do a "take it or leave it" box of vegetables (which sort of forces you to expand your horizons when something shows up in the box that you've never seen before). Others let you pick & choose from the display at a tailgate market. There are about 20 farmers in my area that have a CSA plan. I bought into one that lets you pick & choose since I don't think kale is fit for human consumption and I've not been able to eat turnip roots ever since my grandmother tried to pass off mashed turnips as mashed potatoes when I was about 8 years old then enforced the "clean plate" rule. Yeah, ranch dressing is pretty nasty stuff

So, for tonight's trip to the CSA box, I pulled out collards, chard and a couple of spring onions. The challenge here is collards take a long time to cook whereas chard cooks very quickly. I decided to try fixing braised greens in oyster sauce, something I've read about but never tasted. The prep took longer than the leeks & asparagus from last night. To try to tenderize the collards, I cut the center rib out of the leaves then rolled up the green part and cut them into thin strips. I cut the chard in larger strips -- maybe 1/2 inch. I sliced the spring onions into 1/4 inch slices that got a little wider in the green part. I put a tablespoon of oil in a wide shallow pan over medium high heat and sweated the collards until they were completely wilted. Then I added the spring onions. When they were starting to get soft, I added a clove of chopped garlic. Once the garlic aromas were released, I added the chard and 1/2 cup of chicken stock, covered the pot and turned it to low heat. While the greens were braising, I cooked a package of ramen noodles. By the time they were done, the greens were almost tender. I mixed about a tablespoon of oyster sauce and a splash of rice wine vinegar into the greens, tossed in the noodles and added some pre-cooked frozen shrimp. I put the lid on the pot and let it steam on low heat until the shrimp were warmed through. This could have hit a 10 out of 10 points, but I decided to cut some corners. The shrimp were frozen and they had been in the freezer a little too long and were tough. Instead of real chicken stock, I used the little packet from the ramen noodles so it turned out a little salter than I would have liked. It ended up being more like an 8 out of 10. Tasty enough that I'm going to make it again. This was total improvisation, so you probably won't see anything like it in a cookbook or restaurant.

So, today's adventure in the CSA box was Grilled Leeks & Asparagus. I served it with grilled chicken strips (pre-cooked frozen) & noodles (I used udon but fettuccine or linguine or ramen noodles would be fine). Trim & clean the leeks & asparagus. Pat dry then spread out on baking sheet. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkle with Kosher salt, toss to evenly distribute seasonings then put in 400 F. oven until vegetables are tender (~20 minutes) Toss together the roasted vegetables, cooked noodles & the thawed & heated chicken. Splash on some rice wine vinegar (haven't unpacked my balsamic yet) and top with freshly ground black pepper. Took less than 30 minutes start to finish & was very tasty. Much better than another trip through the drive through. I probably should have cut off the green tops of the leeks, chopped them up and added them to the roasting pan just before the rest of the vegetables were getting tender as they cooked quickly and ended up a little tough & dry.

After living on take-out and frozen dinners for the past several months, in an attempt to eat more nutritious meals I dived into the "farm to table" movement head first this week by purchasing a CSA share. For the next 20 weeks, I'll get a half-bushel box filled with freshly harvested produce grown by a local farmer. Average cost per box is $17.50. The first box had leeks, scallions, chard, collards, bok choy and spring salad mix. There should be a wide variety of items as the season progresses and I don't have to take anything that I really don't like (e.g. kale, turnip roots, rubarb). My pick-up point is the tailgate market half a mile from my house. It's kind of like having a really big garden without having to do all the work. The downside is I ended up paying in advance (big up-front cost) and if there's a crop failure my box might not get completely filled every week. Each farmer sets up their own rules -- some will do a week to week subscription; some pre-pack the box and you take what they decide to put in it; etc. -- so your mileage may vary but the concept is worth looking into if you're trying to eat better. It's going to be interesting to see how this works out over the summer.

This one just makes me happy!

I'm pretty sure there was at least one in The Fearless Vampire Killers

If you're really in the mood for a murder mystery binge... Netflix recently posted Season 19 of Midsomer Murders...start to finish would take you through the Spring, Summer and into the Fall. About the same time, they posted Season 5 of Death in Paradise (sort of a Midsomer Tropical). Season 6 of Longmire (Midsomer of the American West) will release sometime in the fall. Season 1 of Goliath (on Amazon) was the best thing I've seen Billy Bob Thornton in since Fargo. And don't miss Season 3 of Grace & Frankie.