I recently wrote a humorous post on a curmudgeon’s view of cooking. Unlike my questionable cooking, the following cookbook is legitimate.
Please share with anyone you know with food allergies.
For the next five days (Sunday, April 21st to Thursday, April 25th), Chaos Publishing, author of the cookbook, is giving away a free Kindle copy.
The directed site is listed below.
Filed under Uncurmudgeonized
As a Curmudgeon-at-Large, I can’t afford expensive holiday trips. There are no Ritz-Carlton’s or Waldorf Astoria’s in my future. I needed to get away but I needed to economize. I kept looking and looking and finally found one of those inexpensive, all exclusive vacation packages – courtesy of FBN Travel – that sounded too good to be true. It was. Only later did I find out that FBN stood for fly by night.
My first clue should have been the name of the ship on which we were booked.
This is the last time I take a cheap vacation by booking a room on a freighter!
After our rescue, we arrived at port. I was provided with a rental car that fit my budget. (They gave me a tarp in case of rain.)
I drove to our destination. It was advertised as a remote, exclusive getaway off the beaten track.
I had been told that accommodations were authentically rustic.
Economy lodging certainly has its drawbacks.
The beaches were not exactly pristine.
Dining was a unique experience.
After a relaxing vacation, we looked forward to getting back. We only needed to traverse the TSA conga line at the airport.
Yes, I know that all of this is lame but surely you can outdo me with bad vacation experiences. I await your responses.
Filed under Curmudgeonry
Today I’m going to whine about wine.
Early in my adult life, around the discovery of the New World, I developed an appreciation for good wine. Like most curmudgeons, I have champagne tastes on a beer budget. Along with my appreciation for wine, I also developed an appreciation for wine humor. In either Esquire, The New Yorker or Playboy magazine I saw a cartoon of two bums sitting beside each other in the gutter. One of the bums was holding up a brown paper bag that held a bottle of wine and proclaimed to his friend: “It’s a good wine, but not a great wine.” I know how he feels.
Shortly after I came to Washington, DC in search of my first job, I started to frequent the city’s wine shops. At the time, the District of Columbia was one of the few places where a retail shop could also be a direct distributor and, as a result, the District became known for its excellent selection of good and great wines at the lowest available prices. On one of these visits I stopped at the venerable wine shop Plain Old Pearson’s on Connecticut Avenue. As I browsed through the shelves, my eyes grew large when I spotted a bottle of 1973 vintage Chateau Petrus. For wine aficionados, Chateau Petrus is The Holy Grail of wine, a great French Bordeaux from the Pomerol region and one of the most sought after and exclusive bottles of wine in the world. Not only was it there in front of my eyes, it was there for the astounding price of $11 (USD)!
I was both shocked and crestfallen. I was shocked because the price was so low it had to be a mistake and crestfallen because, freshly minted job-seeker that I was, I didn’t have eleven dollars to my name. My shoulders slumped as I shuffled my way back to my dingy apartment to weep over the missed opportunity to buy a bottle of one of the great wines of the world.
Moving ahead to the present day, many of the wine shops in the District are gone – victims to mergers, changing liquor laws and real estate development. Plain Old Pearson’s is still there however at the same spot on Connecticut Avenue. Even though I had not been there in decades, I decided to make a visit when happenstance brought me past its door. Shopping the shelves, I got to the section dedicated to Bordeaux and what should face me but a newer vintage of the self-same Chateau Petrus, now at the healthy price tag of $2,299 a bottle! One again, I was shocked and crestfallen. I still couldn’t afford to buy it.
Oh well, Two Buck Chuck isn’t that bad.
Just like this story, it’s a good whine but not a great whine.
Filed under Humbug!
Death and taxes (in some form or another) are inevitable. But I am writing about the one other inevitable event that will happen in the life of each and every one of you.
There exists, right now, an item that you have been meaning to rid yourself of for some time. No, it has to be inanimate. You can’t count your spouse, the overgrown teenager living forever in the spare bedroom, Betsy the dog or grandpa. It’s inanimate but something to which you attach value – dollar value, sentimental value or business value – that gnaws at your psyche because you haven’t done anything about it and for which you know something needs to be done.
It can be an old car that, given enough time (like a half-century), will become an antique. Same thing with that old coffee table that you got from a family member or at a yard sale that does nothing but collect dust and gives you a nasty bruise in the shins when you rap against it after going down the steps into the basement. Or it could be that box of old accounts at work that your previous boss (or you) couldn’t throw out because someday, somehow the accounting department will want to do research on it. That item exists and you know exactly the item I am talking about.
And, finally, the day comes. Today, and I really, really mean it, I will 1) donate that old clunker to charity; 2) put that coffee table out for the trash or 3) dispose of that box of useless accounts. You steel yourself up for the event, pick up your courage and DO IT. Done! Forever! Gone! Thank God it’s over!
Within a week of THE EVENT, the following happens: 1) Hey, whatever happened to your old junk of a car? Do you know that there is a collector paying TOP DOLLAR for one of those cars regardless of its condition? The guy is nuts but I just made a killing selling him mine. You can, too. 2) What happened to that old coffee table in the basement? I keep Grandma’s priceless brooch hidden in the drawer and now the table is not there. The whole family would be heartbroken if something happened to that brooch. 3) Boy, it’s a good thing that you held onto the Amalgamated Company records. We’re being audited and without those records we are up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
Now it may not be a car, a coffee table or a box of old accounting records. Whatever it is, you are going to make a decision about it and regret it almost instantly.
Death. Taxes. The item. Yes, it will happen to you.
Have a nice day.
Filed under Uncurmudgeonized
What do you REALLY want?
We start our lives full of innocence and without pretensions. Along the way, we start gathering aspirations – some small, others grandiose – the ones that our parents or guidance counselor or life coach dream up for us so that we will, like Pavlovian dogs, salivate at the mere mention of them.
Of course we want to grow up to be all-star athletes or beauty queens or Phi Beta Kappa Rhodes Scholars or dot.com billionaires or rock star/athlete/movie celebrities with our own yacht and castle and gold Bentley. Of course we want to write the next great novel. Of course we want our children to grow up to be doctors or lawyers or CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies.
And we want to win the lottery. And we want world peace, an end to hunger, weight loss without exercise…
But let’s get real here, folks.
What do you really want to achieve in this life? I mean, really?! When I started life, I had delusions of grandeur. Now, in old age, I have delusions of adequacy. I started life wanting to be a teenage Nobel prize-winning PhD Physicist. Given the changes in my life, I’ll now accept unsoiled underwear as a major achievement.
So, what do I want?
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So, what do YOU want?
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Filed under Curmudgeonry
Tagged as annoying people, aspirations, chicken crosses the road, comments, complaints, creamsicles, daily life, humor, humour, musings, Oscar-Meyer wiener, radio-free Europe, thoughts, TV commercials, underachiever