Five Things This Week: 2021 Week 31

Well, geez, it’s been a hell of a week this week! Let’s get into five things to check out, only one of which is particularly heavy…

The Parallel-Parking Job That Ignited the Internet
Curbed
A picture of an impossible parallel parking job posted on Twitter goes viral, and most of the commenters are not kind. What gives? The original poster (and parallel parker) reached out to experts and even to some of the fiercest commenters to see what’s behind the vitriol over a relatively benign picture. And, more importantly, what does that say about us as society today?

His Name Was Emmett Till
The Atlantic
I hope you recognize the name. If you need a reminder, in 1955 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by white men who accused him of “offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store.” That’s what it says in the Wikipedia entry. I’ve heard they said he whistled at her, I’ve heard he touched her… it’s all a lie. She said so herself in 2008. But even that lie doesn’t matter because – as that woman said herself (later in life, naturally), “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” Yeah. No shit.
There’s countless reasons why this story needs to be told and retold and told again so we never forget.
But this is an aspect I didn’t know about: the barn where those terrible men tortured and killed Emmett Till is still there. It’s owned by a dentist. This article questions how we remember and what should we do to preserve those testaments to the memories.

Gunpowder Milkshake
Netflix
I’ve seen some reviews call this a “female John Wick.” That’s wrong on many, many levels, but gets the action/violence level as well as a kind of assassin world-building right. I have been a Karen Gillan stan since her Doctor Who days and here she is amazing as the protagonist assassin who goes off plan when a little girl shows up. The fight scenes are creative while still being visceral and brutal. The lighting, choreography, and outfits are fantastic – I love Gillan’s bowling varsity jacket. The plot is… wait, who cares? The performances and execution (pun intended) carry this movie. (The title link is to the trailer on YouTube)

Loki
Disney+
You know, I honestly thought I’d mentioned this already because it’s been such an “appointment television” every Wednesday it’s been on. On the stroke of midnight Wednesday Akilah would stay off TikTok to avoid spoilers until we had a chance to watch the episode. She even waited until I got back from my trip to watch that week’s episode with me — that’s love, y’all.
But the last episode dropped a couple Wednesdays ago and, man, it was a great run. I think going into it I was expecting something more akin to the upcoming “What If” animated Marvel series coming next month – Loki teleporting to different locations and causing mischief. Instead it’s a wonderful character study of the Loki we’ve met over the series of MCU movies.
There have now been three Disney+ MCU series – WandaVision, Falcon and The Winter Soldier, and now Loki. All three have been so very different and so worth your time. Add in the Mandalorian and Disney+ has more than made itself worth the money in my estimation – not to mention all the upcoming shows, too! (The title link is to the trailer on YouTube)

The Truth Behind The Amazon Mystery Seeds
The Atlantic
Remember the Chinese seed scare last year? I mean, 2020 lasted like ten years so it was a long time ago. But do you remember when people would get unexpected packages from China listed as weird things like “Stud Earrings” only to find the packa ge contained seeds they never ordered? This article revisits that brouhaha and tries to get to the bottom of it. Spoiler: sounds like a cross between people legitimately ordering them and forgetting about it with something called “brushing.” Brushing is where companies “sell” a fake account with a real person’s name and address and send them junk (or seeds) calling it something else more expensive in an attempt to raise their ranking on Amazon or other eCommerce sites. Or, maybe it’s something else. We still don’t fully know. But it’s almost certainly not something nefarious.

For Kione, The Old Soul

Kione came into our life when, really, we shouldn’t have gotten another cat. Late August, 2004 and we already had two cats. I don’t remember how Anna talked me into getting another cat. And then she nearly picked the wrong one – that’s a whole other story…

Kione – Kiki – died today.

She had been going downhill for a few weeks and in the flurry of prepping the puppy run I didn’t get a chance to call the vet. I thought there’d be more time. Kiki was an institution – she outlived her three other cat siblings, Winston, my marriage… she’d been with me through everything. Surely she’d be fine…

She was super skinny when we got her. She’d been at the shelter for almost a month and, well, her time was nearly up. Apparently no one wanted an emaciated tortoise shell cat. They estimated she was about a year old when they brought her in.

When we got her back to our house, though, she fit right in. She had a very old soul and I don’t remember any of the other animals ever having an issue with her. When we adopted Clementine as a kitten, Kiki immediately filled the role of surrogate mamma cat. They were inseparable. Now they’re back together again…

Lately Kiki had been finding more and more obscure places to sleep. The bathmat in front of the shower. Under the couch. On a flattened cardboard box. Her favorite spot, though was in the office. During my last days of work from home week last week she came in and wanted to spend the days like she did during the early lockdown days – perched in front of me as I typed. The tap tap tap of the mechanical keyboard and her warm contented purrs.

I found her in the office when we got home tonight, laying on a blanket half curled up. I bent down to scratch her ears and she didn’t move. I pet her and… she was gone.

There was a time at the River House where she was able to go out through the kitty door and play outside… and hunt! Her tortoise coloring blended in perfectly among the dried leaves in the dappled sunlight through the big fig tree. She caught garter snakes, mice, big scary bugs… there was only one problem: she never actually killed them. Usually, she’d bring her trophies in and present the dazed prey to us and drop it like “Look what I brought you!” And then the snake would start to come to its senses, and I had to figure out how to get this damn live snake out of the house!

I haven’t processed it yet. She’s been in my life for seventeen years. The tears are breaking through the disbelief, but I haven’t yet wrapped my head – or heart – around the magnitude of this loss. She was a quiet, old soul, and her presence ran deep and steady.

I love you, Kione. I’m glad you’re in a better place with Clementine, Amaya, Shurik, and Winston. You will always be in my heart.

Five Things This Week: 2021, Week 27

I’m falling down on my job of regular updating! I didn’t want to miss at least a Five Things for this week!!

Vanishing of Harry Pace
Radiolab
For me Radiolab is one of those podcasts where if you see there’s a new episode it’s going immediately to the top of the “Must Listen” list. Their stories are consistently diverse and fascinating and I know I’m going to learn something new in an interesting way. But this six part series called “The Vanishing of Harry Pace” deals with a black man who lived in the early twentieth century and had a profound effect on music and society in general and who just… disappeared. Within a generation even his grand kids had no idea who he was or even that he (and they) were black.
In piecing together Harry Pace’s history they also get into questions of race identity and representation, and delve into issues as pertinent today as they were a hundred years ago.
Seriously, this is a must listen of a must-listen series.

McCartney 3 2 1 and the Broken Record podcast
I know last week I had a Beatles thing and now it might just seem like I’m obsessed. But, come on, two Beatles related things in two weeks?
Last week I linked to an article on the upcoming “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary that’s airing this fall. Well, it looks like we won’t have to wait that long for some deep Beatles information.
On July 16th Hulu is dropping all six episodes of Rick Rubin interviewing Paul McCartney. There’s a trailer for it here and I’m stoked that I only have to wait a week!
If you don’t know who Rick Rubin is I’d start by saying he’s a producer, but that’s kind of like saying Paul McCartney is a bass player. Rubin started producing the Beastie Boys back in the 80’s before becoming the go-to producer in the 90’s and 00’s. His work with Johnny Cash at the end of his life is enough to get him into musical heaven, but there’s so much more.
One of his projects these days is a podcast with fellow luminaries Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond. In fact, I’d recommend starting with Episode 1 that focuses on… Rick Rubin himself. From there check out Episode 51 where Rubin talks with the remaining members of the Beastie Boys, Mike D and Ad-Rock, as well as Spike Jonze who directed the Beastie Boys documentary, “Beastie Boys Story.” Rubin is a fascinating interviewer and I can’t wait to see what comes out of this extended conversation with McCartney.

Aeropress Coffee Maker (Revisited)
My love for the Aeropress is not new. In fact it made one of my Five Things list back in 2018. But even then I mentioned I have a lot of other ways of making coffee and I genuinely like mixing it up. I love the unparalleled richness that comes from a French press or the crisp clarity from a pour over. And I don’t necessarily have coffee every day – I’ve gone a week or more without having coffee. For me it’s about enjoyment and not fulfilling a habit. On my trip – which you’ll read about next week! – I did end up having coffee every day as part of my getting on the road ritual. Almost every day I relied on the Aeropress. Whether on picnic benches, or the top of one of my panniers, or once on a chair outside a motel room in Utah, the simplicity and consistency of brewing with the Aeropress endeared the device to me anew. The ease of clean up, too, made its use on the road really pleasant.
If you are interested on an Aeropress I recommend watching this YouTube video by James Hoffman about a recommended technique. From the video you can see it’s number three in a series and Hoffman is exhaustive in his testing that gets him to that technique. The other videos are fascinating, but… it’s a lot.

Three “perfect” recipes
Okay, these absolutely are not perfect recipes. Well, to me they’re really, really close. I mean, that’s the thing, right? It’s about personal taste – what constitutes a “perfect” deviled egg to someone could be blasphemy to someone else. I like a mayo-based potato salad and you may not, in which case my recipe is the opposite of “perfect.”
But over the Fourth of July weekend I made these three recipes that I’ve made and worked on for some time and when it came time to eat I was legitimately torn. On one hand, they were delicious. But on the other hand, I felt bad that I didn’t have any meaningful way to improve on what I’d already done.
So that’s my rationale for offering these three recipes up here: to capture in amber these three recipes in a state of “perfection,” because if I want to change them up they might get worse from here… or achieve transcendence!
There’s another reason for putting these here and that’s because they all three have very distinct origins and the style of the recipe reflects that. The ribs I put together out of years of trial and error and working with notes I took from Smitty; of the three, this is the most distinctly my recipe. The basis for the potato salad comes from my ex mother in law and the recipe reflects the sort of never-written-down style of recipe I think we’re all familiar with (“Oh, I don’t make [insert favorite dish] from a recipe. You know, a little of this, a little of that…”). I find that maddening because, well, when that person is gone, so is their recipe. I started by just writing down the recipe as recited to me and refined it from there. Finally, the deviled eggs started from an AllRecipes recipe. For the longest time I didn’t like deviled eggs. I think Jennifer Youngberg’s were the first I had that made me say, “Hey, I might be missing out on something!” The base of this recipe strayed just far enough from traditional that it piqued my taste buds. A little twist here and there and these are some perfect bites!
Here you go:
Jordy’s Trippin’ Ribs
Jordy’s Potato Salad
B’Deviled Eggs

Flash flood at Zion
YouTube
I keep watching this video…
Okay, June 22 we ride in through the south entrance to Zion national park, make an immediate right and find a generous motorcycle parking area alongside RV parking. Terry went to the bathrooms to change into shorts while I slathered on sun block. I sent a selfie to Akilah – you can see I missed rubbing in a spot: