Even before the autumnal equinox arrived the mornings were growing cooler. Just 60° at 9:15 today. I’ve contemplated knickers a couple of times, but haven’t gone there yet. Arm warmers are once again part of the uniform of the day, though.
Since I’m decidedly unhandy when it comes to anything useful that needs doing around here, barring cookery and comedy, with fall all up in our grills we’ve been entertaining a parade of tradesmen plugging various leaks in our fauxdobe rowboat.
The to-do list to date includes: repairs to stucco come unstuck-o; fresh weatherstripping; askew garage door set aright; haircuts for trees and shrubs; flat roof weatherproofed (flat roofs are stupid; in case you were wondering); the remains of the lawn prepped for winter; and finally an irrigation-system blowout.
How I long for a van down by the river. But the house is paid for, and so is the Subaru.
And the river … well, the river needs work too. Mos def a fixer-upper. Hard to find good help for that little project, though.
“When I said ‘I’ll take it black,’ I didn’t mean this black. …”
Cost of coffee? Up nearly 21 percent. Cost of screws from Taiwan, America’s No. 1 supplier?
Just ask the Taiwanese, who make screws for everything from bathroom cabinets to data-center fans.
Margins are thin and getting thinner, as is the herd of manufacturers, thanks to The Pestilence’s 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, plus competition from mainland China on product and the homegrown computer-chip industry for workers and government support.
Kent Chen of Sheh Fung Screws Company told The New York Times that his orders are down 20 percent compared to this time last year.
“Everything is in pause mode. A lot of our customers said, ‘We’ll see,’ but then we didn’t receive many orders.”
Oh, he got his orders, all right. Same as the rest of us.
“Assume the position!”
We are so screwed. Ain’t enough coffee in the world for this bullshit. Especially at these prices.
Writing in The New York Times, proprietor of Wirecutter, food-industry reporter Julie Creswell tells us:
While most food companies are seeing declines in consumer demand for their products, sales of Hamburger Helper are up 14.5 percent in the year through August, getting an extra bump from its appearance on an episode of “The Bear” in June, according to the company that owns the brand, Eagle Foods.
And it’s not just because people are nostalgic for the good old Seventies, Creswell observes. Now, as then, the cost of food consumed at home is up considerably — 21 percent from four years ago — and the prices of beef, coffee, and many fruits and vegetables are likewise rising.
Thus Hungry America returns to Bullshit in a Box to keep their guts from greasing their backbones. Here’s Sally Lyons Wyatt, who advises packaged food companies at the research firm Circana:
“Cost-of-living expenses are up. Eating and drinking expenses are up. Consumers are looking for foods that fill them up for the least amount of money.”
More reporting like this, please. Americans may not care whether Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel still have jobs, but they might get sick of (or from) eating Yellow No. 5 with Extra Sodium three meals a day.
If you’re trying to cut corners as our “leaders” focus on the culture wars rather than cuisine, might I recommend Pierre Franey’s turkey chili? Herself and I can get three or four meals out of that one, spooned atop bowls of rice and sprinkled with crushed corn chips, cilantro, a sharpish cheddar, and a squeeze of lime.
Likewise this simple bolognese from Giada de Laurentiis. We got three servings apiece out of that one this week, over egg noodles, and then spread the remainder on a couple of corn pizza shells from Vicolo. Topped it with grated mozzarella and parmesan with a scattering of crushed red pepper.
Page 1 of 85. I’m surprised the judge didn’t order these ambulance-chasers summarily hanged.
Well, “tedious and burdensome” is one way to describe The Pestilence’s latest lawsuit against The New York Times.
“Wall-to-wall bullshit” is another. Or “the ramblings of an ADHD preschool dropout ‘parented’ by an outlaw-biker uncle who makes him work without safety gear in his poorly ventilated meth lab.”
But Judge Steven D. Merryday of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida clearly is not one for hyperbole, and so he confined his observations to phrases like “tedious and burdensome,” and “florid and enervating,” noting that in alleging only two simple counts of defamation, “the complaint consumes eighty-five pages.”
“A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner,” Hizzoner wrote.
He added — without giggling, which must have been difficult, because this shit is funnier than Jimmy Kimmel on a good day — that the complaint, as written, “stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart” legal requirements that complaints must be “a short and plain statement of the claim.”
And then Merryday wrapped things up the way editors of my early attempts at journalism were known to do, by crumpling that big ol’ 85-page pile of bushwa into a wad and throwing it at the authors, with further instructions appended.
“This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner,” Merryday wrote. “The complaint is STRUCK with leave to amend within twenty-eight days. The amended complaint must not exceed forty pages, excluding only the caption, the signature, and any attachment.”
Disney CEO Vernon “Dean” Wormer pulls the plug on Jimmy Kimmel.
The Dean came for Jimmy Kimmel’s “Animal House” yesterday.
Nobody should be surprised, especially Kimmel, who has been attending the Hollywood School of Hard Knocks for the better part of quite some time and been sacked and/or compelled to apologize more than once over a long and checkered career.
Kimmel got his start in radio while still in high school, but didn’t land on America’s TV screens until 1977, when he provided the comic relief on “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” which aired on Comedy Central. “The Man Show” followed two years later.
And then in 2003 he got to hang out his own late-night shingle, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC.
Maybe he felt safe there. Comedy Central would fall under the pinstriped shadow of Paramount, which earlier this year punked CBS News and Stephen Colbert to get its merger with Skydance approved.
But this year, ABC — a lesser rub-and-tug parlor in the Disney chain of cut-rate whorehouses — found itself caught between two rocks and a very hard place.
Two big owners of TV stations — Nexstar and Sinclair, the first seeking FCC approval to buy a rival, the second a right-wing white-noise machine — said they would suspend “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after he addressed the killing of the recently canonized — or is that “cannonized?” — Charlie Kirk. Disney’s empty suits took notice and then gave same to Kimmel, reportedly as his audience was filing in for yesterday’s show.
If Kimmel didn’t see it coming, Calvin Coolidge certainly did. In an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on January 17, 1925, the president said: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”
Some of them are, for sure. And you’re only funny until you get in their way.
Mad Blog Media 
