A good Saturday morning all. A week of new coffee filters, switched from brown to white. For you who have always wondered, no taste difference. It’s still great.

Coronadoom – is with us and won’t go away. Some crazy color scheme has kept Ohio guessing – I believe our county is now ‘Covid Hot Pink’ – but ask what that means and you get a blank stare. I think that what creates the anger and the mental health issues is in part due to the arbitrary, capricious, subjective, and illogical edicts made by unelected bureaucrats and imperial politicians (this week our State generated complete ban on pharmacies to fill prescriptions for HCQ, this was reversed by our courts within a day – whoopsy-daisy).

At the same time options differing from the ‘proscribed’ are flat-out banned even though front line fully certified Doctors from across the country offer alternatives and hope. >>>Click underlined Below<<<

Press Conference of America’s Frontline Doctors

Funerals are tightly controlled, yet we see a dignitary’s massive event with a completely packed sanctuary. As of last evening, no drinks to be served after 10, and doors closed by 11; huh? And so it goes; this while the death count is quite similar to the annual flu. It’s a bad joke except for the power grab which will quickly become a new norm. The latter is no joke.

Music – Last Saturday I ‘repackaged’ myself with a bit of immersion. It was a couple of hours with Randy Bachman’s ‘Vinyl Tap’ show on Canada’s CBC-1. Randy was a founding member of the classic rock band The Guess Who and hard rock band Bachman–Turner Overdrive. Last Saturday, his Vinyl Tap’s subject was “He – She music”; a piece introduced and then re-popularized by someone from the other gender.

So, here are a couple of ‘bits’ to clear your head. What would a Boy-Band from the 1870s look like? The heartthrobs of yesteryear.

We all know the amazing career that the Bee Gees had. Their impact on popular music would have been clipped dramatically had the early lyrics to one of their most popular pieces been recorded. But they were! And, had this version not ended up as a pile of tape on the studio floor, their career would have ended tragically:

Landscaping — We live less than three miles from our city center, and the ‘Nati does fall around the top 30 largest places in the nation. Therefore, I was a wee bit more surprised to discover that ten or so houses from our corner of Chaos and Mayhem five Goats were busily cleaning up a yard. Yup GOATS! Their back yard goes up a steep hill for about 80 feet and was overgrown. Five hungry Goats complete with their multiple stomachs were brought in to tackle the job. 

I told you these Ramblings would be light-hearted.

“I was surprised….sometimes you find something that you didn’t expect.” ~ Danish cheese and microflora study co-author Morten Rahr Clausen, a postdoc in the department of food science at Aarhus University in Denmark.

The Cheese – I love cheese. I love really good cheese. ‘Good’ meaning cheese filled with a load of bacteria; aged cheese meets that criteria. This brings me to Jungle Jim’s, our World Market for ‘Foodies’. Their cheese section spans a complete aisle in an average grocery store. And here is where I win taking advantage of our FDA rules.

By edict, food has to have an expiration date – however many cheeses improve with age; something to which the FDA pays no mind. So, I scour the section at Jungle Jim’s which offers products approaching their expiration date and offered at a discount. Yup, I’m not proud; I look for some cheese ‘bonanzas’. Often I am in luck.

Here is a sample ‘find’: A .26 lb wedge of Gourmino Ur Eiche cheese (a raw, cow’s milk cheese made by a mostly female team in the Girenbad creamery in Switzerland) normally at $24.99 per pound I got it for $1.04. I think a Jungle Jim’s staffer asked me why I was doing a jig in the aisle.

Fini – Next week marks the 56th year of the passing of my father. I am already well beyond both in his age at death and years since his passing. It’s all just flown by – life is like that isn’t it? Still miss you dad!

Our ‘Duck’ — this past week marked the 30th year since the Citroën 2CV (French: “Deux Chevaux” i.e. “deux-chevaux-vapeur”, literally, “two steam horses” or two tax horses) stopped with production. Our ‘Duck’ is an air-cooled front engine, front-wheel-drive car. It was introduced at the 1948 Paris Mondial de l’Automobile. Ours was built in 1989 — during the last month of production at their plant in Portugal.

Today, the first of August in 1944 marks the day that Anne Frank made her final entry in her diary. She was arrested three days later.

Today in 1957 the US and Canada created the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). This finally allowed us to track Santa Claus on his travels from the North Pole for his annual ‘visit the kiddies’ trek.

Then, this day in 1958 the US Post Office upped First Class postage from 3 cents to 4 cents. Had they ‘bit the bullet’ and moved it directly to today’s 55 cents they might not be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy here in 2020.

A couple of days ago another American hero passed, Herman Cain. With the horror show of political sputtering taking place this election year we should celebrate his life. Here was a man able to establish and live the American dream without tons of ‘let us do it for you’ legislation. He was Black and grew up ‘threadbare’ in Memphis during the Jim Crow period. He became a Navy mathematician later chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Climbed the corporate ladder at Pillsbury, Burger King, then the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, and eventually ran as a candidate for the Presidency.

Make it great week, keep the peace, stay safe, and be healthy! All Lives Matter.

Dirk