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July.
Hot is coming.
Dogs and days like thunder and lightning, side by side.
We thought we’d provide a bit of escape with some books, some funky design, art, quizzes and a giggle or three, a visit to France and a slice of info on how to buy a good watermelon.
So busy. Love July. August will be here before you know it.
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There’s a growing movement in parts of Japan for companies to design their offices and factories to resemble – sometimes slightly – sometimes a perfect reflection – of what they build or sell. From beer to chocolate to yummy snacks…they’re having a bit of fun in Japan.
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Kirin Beer Factory (Nagoya)
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Located along the Tokaido Shinkansen Line (and viewable as you’re pulling out of Nagoya Station) is the Kirin Beer Factory. The tanks are immediately recognizable because they’re painted to look just like a tall glass of beer: golden brown on the bottom with white foam at the top. If you’re actually in Nagoya you can also schedule a free tour and tasting! | |
Meiji Chocolate Factory (Osaka) | In 2011 Meiji, known for their chocolate candy, decided to refurbish their first factory that was originally built in 1955. Since then it’s been a magical place for kids and the company wanted to instill that same magical spirit into their new factory. | |
Given that the Kyoto train line runs directly south, Taisei Design proposed an idea that to make the entire façade look like a gigantic bar of chocolate that can be seen from the train. It’s 92 feet high and 545 feet long, which is equivalent to 38,000 bars of chocolate. | |
Shunkado began as a small, Japanese-style confectionery shop in 1887. They’re known for several signature creations including the iconic Unagipie pastry made from eel extract. (This is a judgement free zone, please) | |
To mark the 130th anniversary of the company’s founding, Shunkado redesigned their headquarters to resemble oversized tables and chairs. No, they don’t sell furniture but they like to think that their snacks bring families together around the dining table, hence the unique design. The interiors are also decorated with outsized objects that are all associated with tea time and snacking, making visitors feel like Lilliputians. | |
In Okinawa there’s a bar and eatery known as the Barrel Restaurant. It’s called Taru Tonneau (taru means barrel in Japanese) and the shop is shaped like a gigantic whiskey barrel. It’s been around since at least 2012 but its website looks like it’s from the ‘90s. It’s one of the more wild novelty architecture designs we’ve come across but it certainly does the trick in announcing its business. | |
Take The Daniels Energy Challenge | |
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Inflation is still running at 6-8%
Home Heating Oil Prices Are Still Higher Than 2022
Natural Gas Prices up 14.5%
Energy Kinetics System 2000 Can Save You up to 40%!
Finance With 10% Down* - 0.99% apr - 10Years*
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Take The Energy Kinetics System 2000 Challenge
Here's an actual customer example.
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Customer Uses average of 1,000 gallons (Sept-May)
For 2023-24 Avg Cost: $3.95 per gal. = $3,950
EK2K cuts usage by 35%= 350 gallons
That's Savings of $1,383.50 in Year 1
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REPLACE the numbers with YOUR usage.
See how much you can save this year!
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*You need to purchase a new Energy Kinetics System 2000 by August 1, 2023 in order to receive the $500 fuel offer. Your account will be credited for $500 after the installation of a new system is completed and paid in full. 0.99% for 120 months through EnergizeCT. Size of down payment necessary for financing rate – 10-20% - is dependent on zip code and size of home. Limitations apply. Customer example is for illustration only. Your savings may be higher or lower. See Daniels representative for complete details. CT License S1-385517 HOD#19 / Daniels Propane. LLC: CT License S1-302857 | |
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Just a reminder of what was. Once.
If this is painful, scroll down we’ll make it up to you.
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Midsummer Eve at Vejle Fjord by Harald Moller. 1904 | |
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Dripping? What Dripping!
(aka: Out Damn Spot)
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OK so 20+ years ago you put in a shiny new oil tank in the basement. It’s served you so well. Until you spotted the spot. It’s a nasty spot. Ugly and greasy and…it smells. Not to get to Shakespearean on you but it may be time to “shuffle off its mortal coil.”
We’ve got three great choices:
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The Granby “Ecoguard” Tank | |
All three will give you 25+ years of peace of mind, can be installed in one day by Daniels trained professionals and all provide leak protection. So if you hear a bit of dripping in the basement or see a spot that isn’t supposed to be there – | |
Trying to keep this simple (it’s hot, it’s July, so, ya know, we’re being nice). Tell us here who created this and you may win a lovely Amazon gift card. We tried to help by leaving in his/her signature. | |
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The sun works. Every day. Even on those cloudy days.
So maybe, this summer would be the perfect time to consider going Solar. With Trinity Solar.
Daniels Energy has been recommending Trinity Solar for more than three years and with good reasons.
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• Zero Upfront Costs
• Producing clean renewable energy
• No-cost solar installation
• Pay less for your power
• 30% Federal Tax Incentives for Purchase
• Trinity Solar Rate is Fixed – NOT Variable
• Warranty of 25 Years – Parts and Labor
• Reduce your Delivery Charges up to 90%
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Remember – IF You Qualify:
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TRINITY Solar will install a solar system with NO out of pocket cost.
TRINITY Solar will guarantee your rate will be lower than your current provider.
TRINITY Solar will install, insure, maintain and service your system at NO COST.
TRINITY Solar will cap your rate for term of your agreement.
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Get the details on solar with Trinity Solar – give us a call and we’ll put you in touch with Rich De Lorenze our dedicated solar expert!
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Take a break from TV. Streaming. Movies. Instagram. Tik Tok. Radio. Talking.
Read a book. Any book. But these are a few (from the Washington Post) that might make your summer something of a discovery. Especially, at least for me, the last one. Pick one and enjoy!
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The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
By Jonathan Rosen
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Nonfiction | We know how this haunting story will end: with a murder that made national headlines. Rosen was friends with the eventual killer, Michael Laudor, from the time they were 10 years old.
Throughout this book — part memoir, part manifesto — Rosen asks uncomfortable but crucial questions, some of them unanswerable, all of them compelling, and the result is an incisive but intimate tour de force.
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Collected Works
By Charles Portis
Fiction | An ex-Marine from the Texas Panhandle adopts a performing chicken on a long bus ride home from New York. – Come on – with that opening – how could you not want to read the rest! A touchingly ineffectual pseudo-religion turns out to harbor real cosmic truth.
A hard-nosed, narrowly reformed antiques smuggler finds unlikely love in rural Mexico. These are the sorts of things that occur in the singular novels of Portis. “True Grit” and the rest of his funny, strange novels are gathered here, along with his essays and journalism.
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The Covenant of Water
By Abraham Verghese
Fiction | The author of “Cutting for Stone” delivers a rich, heartfelt novel, a lavish smorgasbord of genealogy, medicine and love affairs, tracing the evolution of a family in India from 1900 through the 1970s.
The family’s dark secret? “In every generation … at least one member has drowned unexpectedly” — even though those who sense they are afflicted with “The Condition” try their utmost never to get wet.
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King: A Life
By Jonathan Eig
Nonfiction | The most compelling account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life in a generation, Eig’s new biography draws on more than 200 interviews, including with scores of people old enough to have known or observed King, and numerous accounts gathered by other journalists and scholars, some of them never published before. The result is a deeply reported psychobiography, infused with the narrative energy of a thriller.
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Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
By Claire Dederer
Nonfiction | How badly must an artist behave before he is canceled? Should any artist be canceled, ever? Is there a proper way to balance our admiration for their work with our loathing of their deeds?
These are the questions Dederer considers in this vital, exhilarating book. She shows the queasy, perhaps unresolvable back-and-forth we engage in when we consider these issues.
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Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
By Malcolm Harris
Nonfiction | Palo Alto: land of Stanford University, heart of Silicon Valley. In his new book, Harris does for the city of 70,000 what Mike Davis’s classic “City of Quartz” did for Los Angeles, looking past the fables about the place to its darker underbelly.
Harris narrates the town’s evolution and influence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and theorizes, above all, that it is defined by its rapacious, exploitative approach to capitalism and profit.
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American Midnight
Adam Hoschschild
I couldn’t believe what I didn’t know about the period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties. Astonished.
The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens' arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.
It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinx-like Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O'Hare and Emma Goldman, to J. Edgar Hoover.
In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country—and showing how their struggles still guide us today
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Get Ugly. Win Grill
EXTENDED!!!
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Yes, it is a contest. We will provide a shiny new Blackstone propane griddle (we may even toss in the propane) to the person with the ugliest, nastiest, grossest most detestable photo of their home air conditioner.
No window units please, that’s too easy.
No, we want the compressor that stopped working when the Yankees last won the World Series. We want a shot of the single worst looking piece of badly maintained a/c equipment since Mr. Carrier invented the thing.
Send it – with your name – using the button shown below and if our completely unqualified judges select your entry you will be bbq-ing in style this summer. Hurry contest closes 7.16.23
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You’re having a BBQ or just a quiet dinner for eight under the stars. Maybe start the whole thing off with this summer special! | |
The Lemon-Lavender Gin Rickey.
3 ounces Tanqueray gin
4 ounces freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoons honey
4 ounces seltzer water
2 sprigs lavender
2 wedges of lemon
1 Pour gin, lemon juice, & honey over ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake well.
2 Strain into two glasses filled with ice. Top with seltzer.
Garnish each glass with a sprig of lavender and a slice of lemon.
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If this makes your mouth water…here’s how to pick one that’s perfect… | |
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If you’re traveling to France this might help explain some things. If not, it might still explain some things. Don’t miss the Tour de France this July!
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Quiz #2 (the" Where Are We" Quiz) | |
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It’s summer. We should be traveling. So, if you wound up here – where would you be?
Tell us here and you may win an Amazon gift card.
| Last month more than 80 entries delivered the following winners: Richard C and Carol G recognized January Jones and Dita Von Teese, while 21 of you including Ruth V figured out the clue from the barber’s shutters which said, “I shall dance daily and utter loud screams in this window listen after 8pm.” And Mary Jean B was the lucky winner of the “Where Are We?” quiz which was, of course…Crystal Worlds (home of the Swarovski museum and theme park) in Wattens, Austria. | |
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Which is the best thrill ride within shouting distance: Boulder Dash or Batman?
Lake Compounce offers Boulder Dash, voted the best wooden roller coaster five times. At 2-½ minutes it’s the longest wooden coaster ride in the country.
Plus, it’s got that “wooden rickety” feel that just makes you shiver.
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Cerberus as a puppy, guarding the gates to heck. | |
4,000 years ago, pyramids were built and then this.... | |
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Daniels Energy: CT License S1-385517 HOD#19 /
Daniels Propane. LLC: #846 CT License S1-302857
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