February, 2024

"This Just In..."

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We debated. We argued.

We entered into deep philosophical discussions.

In the end, we agreed to disagree.

This issue of “This Just In…” will be about love...‘cause, February.

Yes, it was either going to be love or long lengthy pieces on the history of Groundhogs and their Day (we shortened it to two short paragraphs) or epistles, promises and reminders of Valentine’s Day and all that makes the world go round.

Too sappy for you? 

That’s, of course, our big worry. Your 98-year-old home comfort partner whistling up stories of love. We saw the risk. But, we’re willing to chance it.

Hope you enjoy this issue of “This Just In…”

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

H. L. Mencken

Buttercup and Westly.

In the movie, “Princess Bride,” what phrase does Princess Buttercup hear that helps her realize that the “masked man” is really her one true love, Westley? Think you know? Click here – you may win a $25 Amazon gift card.

The winners for January included Joe R who named the snow plow: The Big LePlowski and Marshall H who suggested Mailbox Murderer. Perfect! 77 of you plus winners Mary Ann M and Lynn K recognized our famous city: Barcelona. Thank you all for playing.

Love that is not madness is not love.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

If your home’s oil tank is 25-30+ years old - now might be the perfect time to replace it with a new Roth or Granby oil tank. And - during February - SAVE $250 On A New Tank! 

So, don’t dilly or dally - call Sally and Let Daniels Do It!

860 813 9122

There have been some great kisses captured on film over the years. We thought we’d share a few as part of our remedial romance study program. Follow these few simple directions and with a bit of practice you too can create something memorable.

Albert Einsenstadt’s 1945 photo on V-J Day in NYC

Does she have a ghost of a chance with Swazzy?

A special workplace romance. In space, yet!

Frankly Scarlett, you need kissing.

Love & Basketball’s Epps & Lathan

There are no cruel intentions here.

Rain? What rain? Make a note of it.

Paris can turn a smooch into something quite memorable. Here’s Robert Doisneau’s proof.

Actors John C Rice and May Irwin shared a kiss that lasted but a few seconds – but it was the first ever recorded on motion picture film. It prompted demands for censorship. Whoa! Here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zURTEs8C1lo

Nobody puts Baby in the corner, without a kiss.

They called it, “A Love Story.”

Donna Reed and James Stewart kiss like it really matters.

Charlton Heston goes Ape!

C’mon…we had to. Fade to Twilight.

Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is

willing to see less.

Julins Gordon

Look at what you missed by not living in Chicago. That’s Lakeshore Drive.

Suddenly, the Constitution State looks pretty good!

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love,

time is eternity.

Henry Van Dyke

We’re madly in love with the oldest wooden – yes, wooden – escalator. In Antwerp, Belgium.

For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.

Judy Garland

In February we’re starting a new advertising campaign to share our efforts to help, in albeit, a small way, to reduce our company’s - and our customers’ carbon footprint. We’re trying to be responsible and we thought you should be the first to know.

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Last month we gave you 12 books to consider for the new year. Then we stumbled on these…wicked reviews and thought we had to share them.

Welcome to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year.

We make a sacrificial offering to the literary criticism gods in the hope of a bountiful review harvest for the coming year. So here they are, in all their gory, gut-punchin’ glory: the most scathing book reviews of 2023.

“Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer … There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter …

To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best …

There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your savior turns out to be the world’s loudest crank? 

Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.”

–Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk 

“…a book that must rank as one of the most bizarre I’ve ever read. Yes, it is—at moments—very sad. There’s ongoing shame in it for tabloid journalism. But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire.

It’s not only that Harry is so petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle. With every page, his California makeover grows less convincing …

What kind of person insists on an air-clearing meeting with their father on the day of his father’s funeral? A myopic, self-obsessed, non-empathic kind of person, I would say. Exactly the same kind of person, in fact, who would talk about reconciliation in the same breath as they publicly slag off their family …

Such things are made all the more jarring by the yawning gap between the way Harry speaks and the way his ghost, JR Moehringer, writes… Sometimes, Moehringer writes. Like this. In short sentences. Bang. Bang-bang. At other times, it’s as if he’s been at Harry’s weed or something …a pact more Faustian by far than anything his father or brother have ever signed.”

–Rachel Cooke on Prince Harry’s Spare 

“Killing Moon is so cruelly, brutally misogynistic and brimming with every savage cliche of crime fiction that it’s barely readable … Nearly ten pages into Killing Moon, I wondered whether Nesbo had always depicted women in such a cruel, hateful way. Perhaps some readers simply don’t mind Nesbo’s description of young women as ‘parasitic bimbos on the hunt for a suitable host’ because, as he asserts, it’s traditional …

Maybe someone needs to remind Nesbo that storytelling that relies on tired cliches that frame women as hapless gold-digging victims who are lucky to have an ancient, alcoholic ex-cop on their case is a literary tradition we can do without.”

–Cat Woods on Jo Nesbø’s Killing Moon 

… Mom Rage is Dubin’s book-length effort to grant mothers the absolution that many of them seek …

Reading paraphrases of paraphrases of paraphrases, one starts to feel as if there is something a little hollow and shiftless about the ease with which phrases such as ‘white supremacist, homophobic, classist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist patriarchy’ are trotted out. We get the right words, strung together like marquee lights, but not the structural analysis that puts them in relation to one another …

Dubin does not appear to have interviewed any mothers who do not claim to suffer from mom rage. Nor has she interviewed her father … No doubt the patriarchy and capitalism have power, but how precisely that power results in the rage of mothers toward their children, as opposed to their husbands or their bosses, remains unclear … The imprecision of Dubin’s language strands her argument on unstable ground …

How clearly can a writer see anyone or anything—her children or the social and political contours of motherhood—when she perceives everything through the haze of moral cliché?”

–Merve Emre on Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood

“Now, in her early 40s, she has published a memoir, which for ephemeral, unreflective celebrities like her is usually a way of fending off imminent obsolescence. 

The book—ventriloquized by Joni Rodgers, who describes herself as a ‘story whisperer’—is as vapid and vaporous as the fragrances Hilton sells; all the same, archaeologists may one day consult it in the hope of understanding how and why our species underwent a final mutation into something glossily post-human.

The antics of this entitled flibbertigibbet expose the absurdity of a culture in which the self only exists if it is validated by a selfie, membership of society depends on the mirage of social media and the reality in which we were all once anchored has been replaced by a flimsy virtual replica …

This air-headed mysticism merges with the digital revolution, which allowed Hilton to disseminate her image around the globe and to seep into our defenseless heads … Yes, it’s her world and after reading her book I just wish I could move off-planet.”

–Peter Conrad on Paris Hilton’s Paris: The Memoir 

“As usual the ‘action’ proceeds by peristalsis, with descriptions of roads, shops, real estate, traffic jams, motels, tourist attractions and free publications constantly interrupted by long, unwieldy flashbacks to all the stuff that’s happened since the last Frank Bascombe novel.

It’s immersive stuff: reading these books is the closest you’ll come to being stuck in an actual traffic jam without leaving the comfort of your armchair …

First, there’s nothing novel about this novel … Why this boorish, boring also-ran is taking up fresh shelf space in 2023 is a mystery.”

–Claire Lowdon on Richard Ford’s Be Mine 

“It would be nice at this point to confirm Hanks’s book as a satire. That way we could applaud the means by which it deftly—even affectionately—pricks the pompous self-regard of Hollywood’s inner circle, complete with a star who unwinds by taking her Cirrus jet for a spin and a gonzo method actor who insists on sleeping in a tent. We might then go on to laugh at the idiotic footnotes that provide a needless justification for the use of slang and blithely mis-explain Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin.

Alarmingly, though, this tale is deadly serious. Johnson is great and Knightshade is amazing and therefore everything about them is a source of endless fascination. The production, says Hanks, runs for 53 days. Somehow his book makes it feel even longer …A bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction, a bungled behind-the-scenes tour that can’t see the wood for the trees. It’s crying out for an editor. The plot is borderline incontinent … making a movie is tough; writing a novel is hard, too.. Overall I confess it was very much not for me.”

–Xan Brooks on Tom Hanks’ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

“What of the book? Permit me to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself: Be Useful is a raw deal, a hollow PR exercise filled with precepts and quips but devoid of self-awareness or humility.

You might be swayed by Arnie’s touching faith in bipartisanship and the need to tackle the climate crisis or moved by his tales of heroic procurement of personal protective equipment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as a pitch for Marcus Aurelius status…it’s thoroughly expendable—an overpromoted TED Talk, just another cross-promotional weapon in the Schwarzenegger multimedia arsenal.”

–Charles Arrowsmith on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life 

 A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

Oscar Wilde

Maybe it’s rottweiler puppies. Or origami birds. Skydiving, translating Sanskrit, Veganism, wrist wrestling, bullfighting or I don’t know…Steampunk. Whatever binds you together, whatever enriches your collective hearts, that’s a good place to find love

Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate!

Sandra J. Dykes

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not

know where he ended and she began.

Leo Tolstoy

BROWN BUTTER ALMOND PASTA

• Fine salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 pound linguine or spaghetti
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 cup sliced almonds
• 2 fresh rosemary sprigs
• ¼ teaspoon red-pepper flakes, plus more to taste
• ¼ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice, plus more to taste
• 1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest
• 4 to 5ounces baby or wild arugula, coarsely chopped, or use baby kale or spinach (4 to 5 cups)
• Grated Parmesan, for serving

1. Step 1 Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook until it is 1 minute shy of being al dente, usually a minute or 2 less than the package instructions. Scoop out about 1½ cups pasta water, then drain pasta.
2. Step 2 While the pasta cooks, in a large skillet or Dutch oven, melt butter over medium heat. Cook, swirling occasionally, until the foam subsides, the milk solids turn golden-brown and the butter smells nutty and toasty, 3 to 4 minutes. (Make sure it doesn’t burn.)
3. Step 3 Stir in almonds, rosemary and red-pepper flakes, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the nuts are toasted and slightly darker in color, about 1 minute.
4. Step 4 Add about 1 cup pasta water to the skillet and bring to a simmer. Add lemon juice, zest, ½ teaspoon salt and a large pinch of black pepper, then add drained pasta and toss well. Add arugula, tossing until it wilts. Simmer for another minute, if needed, to thicken the sauce until it’s thick and glossy. If the mixture seems dry, add more pasta water 1 tablespoon at a time.

You know you're in love when you don't want to fall asleep because

reality is finally better than your dreams.

Dr. Seuss

From 1729, Pennsylvania newspaper

Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.

George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

Quilts are usually created with love in mind. A way to remember, to warm, to celebrate. Here’s a testimony to persistence and passion.

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In 1856, a 17-year-old girl named Adeline Harris started making a unique quilt. Over the next two decades, she sent pieces of silk to famous people from around the world and they signed them and sent them back to her. She assembled them into a quilt with a tumbling blocks pattern (aka, the Q*bert pattern).

 The signatures that Harris was able to acquire are astounding: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse, Alexandre Dumas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alexander von Humboldt, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oh, and eight US Presidents: Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant.

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Can you solve this riddle:

What breaks but cannot fall,

can leap but never crawl,

can be seized but never gripped

often present, never skipped.

All four answers contain the same root word. (Such help!) Need all four words or phrases. Got it, already? Tell us here and you may win one of those fabulous, yet somewhat mysterious, Amazon gift cards! We so love it when you’re creative.

Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all

else is surely desert.

Robert Brault

How could they create this magnificent stairwell – and not be in love? Just askin’

Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.

Germaine Greer