A trio I did not want to report

Found out yesterday that my Father-in-Law's Cousin's Wife died. Finally got to meet her during our last visit in June. Lovely woman, who had a very subtle and vicious sense of humor. She and her husband were both doctors, helped build hospitals in India in their missionary work. Good people, who sent us a cool quaich, for our wedding, which we used in the ceremony. They also gave me a great word to use in Scrabble. Hoping the best for her husband of at least fifty years, who faces life without his partner.

Was also very dismayed to hear of the death of Monica Harris in a car accident on Thursday. She was the Wife of Joseph, aka Logic, a poet whom I have come to know though his visits to Columbus. They were both just here a couple of weeks ago with their baby, their third. I cannot imagine what he is going though. It's very hard for my brain to deal with three small kids having to grow up without their Mother. This is a family that has been broken, but will be strong. They also need help. A GoFundMe page has been set up on their behalf. If you can, please consider a donation.

After he announced he had pancreatic cancer a few weeks ago, I figured death was inevitable but did not expect it to be so soon. Pat Conroy was one of my favorite writers. His use of rich, expressive language was an incredible skill. His work was a pleasure to read. His best, and worst traits were that he talked to much. Would have loved to have got to hear him read and tell him thank you. That there will be no new Pat Conroy work makes my world a sadder place.

A vaudeville trick

Was thinking about pith helmets last night and this morning, and the colonialism they ended up representing. To me the helmet was something Groucho Marx wore in Animal Crackers, part of a costume. Then I realized Captain Spaulding was probably a poacher, or even worse.

Everything becomes problematic, if you really want to parse through it enough.

The original excitement over the Ghostbusters trailer quickly became but aren't there enough sassy black women who are not scientists the way the while women are depicted in this film.

Ten years ago today, I mentioned pith helmets in a live journal post.

I did not know this while I was thinking of the pith helmets.

Years ago, I did dress as Groucho for Halloween, and wore a borrowed pith helmet. I do not think my costume was problematic even though I put lamp black on my eyebrows and upper lip.

Ghostbusters 1984 is as good as Animal Crackers, but not Duck Soup. I hope Ghostbusters 2016 is better than A Day at the Races, or at least The Big Store.

No, I do not know what any of this means - other than I want the best for all of us.

Double secret filtration

My social media feed is looking more and more like the ad block of the nightly news during October of a national election year. How many different ways can it be said that a person does not like another person?

Quite a few I guess with all the memes, links and other sources of dislike.

Can only unfollow so many people. I know they're passionate. I get that. It's great.

It's also overwhelming. Very overwhelming to see the same links over and over. Dozens of links to the same John Oliver video. Wow, it is funny, but his audience is the converted.

So I am filtering out a word for the time being, to see how much that cleans up my feed to what I want it to be - and to keep my blood pressure down.

Now it's back to cat pictures and Hamilton/Rent mashups.

Tale of two cities

Did something out of the norm last night and left the car at home. Since we're not in walkable distance of anything, we took the COTA bus downtown for dinner at a newer restaurant It's been a stressful time and this was a good opportunity to relax, have a good meal, a couple of drinks, and not have to worry about parking downtown or getting an OMVI on the way home.

I did not realize Salt and Pine took up most of the length of a city block. It does not go deep into the building, but the layout is very modern. Some tables are intimate and secluded, while others seem to be on public display. We got a window table with a view of High Street.

The service is excellent, though I could not help but notice our female servers had one button extra unbuttoned on their work shirts. The flank steak I had was outstanding, my wife had a pork cheek pasta that was very good. The cocktails were fresh and potent. I had my first taste of Pisco. Our fig pudding dessert was the one minus. It was too dry and needed a soaking in the sauce.

It is odd, paying an electric bill for dinner. What a few years ago would have been a serious luxury was not so this time. We can't afford to go there weekly, or even monthly, but this was a gift for my wife and I. Ten years ago this would have been impossible. Finances have improved. We're alright, not great, but better than ok.

On a day where the city of Columbus deemed that the short north was no longer a place for low income people to live, the ride home was an unsettling reality of the two cities in my city.

This is the route my wife takes, everyday, and she hears stories, sees things and they're not pleasant. At one stop, a good portion of the passengers got off and crossed over at West Mound. These people were all going to the homeless shelter on Harmon. Heaven help this city if there's another shelter for people in the inner core. We have to have them outside of downtown, out of sight, at a spot you can't access easily by foot. Where your journey to a cot for the night begins at an unlit bus stop.

I do not have any real answers, and I'm not going to be guilt tripped after having an expensive dinner. There's a gap though, between me in a warm room tapping this on my Macbook Pro in our underwater mortgaged house. There are changes coming for the better for my family. Others though, I wonder where there is hope.

Millie Jackson gets it right

Some days I want to put this in as a comment to a lot of posts on social media.

From Portugal, with awesome sauce

Cover of the Lucille Mathis song. I'm digging the groove here, a lot.

Snow Day reading about craft beer turns into a blog post

Another snow day today so while the boy is upstairs on his iPad I got to read an interesting local blog post about weirdness in the local craft beer trade. I've read some interesting whispers about things that are happening locally that are quite sad and disturbing and I'm pleased to see someone was brave enough to put their thoughts down.

Very little of what the author wrote surprised me. She was spot on in her reporting that micro-breweries are putting out mediocre beer just to have something new to market. If you can't establish why you wanted to become a craft brewer with a signature beer or two, drinkers are going to find you out when you keep putting adjectives into cans instead of decent product.

Read the post I linked to, it summarizes a lot of what I've been micro-ranting about on social media for the past few years.

Here's my post about Trophy Beverages from 2014.

When I worked for McGee's back in the nineties, there was a lot of cooperation and synergy between retailer/wholesaler and the few micro-breweries in Columbus at the time. We were trying to break even at best, which did not happen to McGee's in the long run, and introduce good products to our customers. And if a brand did not work, we did not recommend or support it. Sorry to Gambrinius who had some massive sanitation issues when an attempt was made to bring the brand back.

Every Friday turned into a beer tasting, we'd open up the new stuff, people would bring in beer that they had acquired on the travels to The Party Source or out of state and we'd discover what was happening in other states or a cool foreign beer we could not get in Ohio. Sure it was illegal to do it so openly, it was all new.

Our shop put on one of the first outdoor beer festivals in Columbus in 1996 when we pitched a couple of tents in the Bank Block parking lot behind the shop, invited the local brewers and wholesalers to pour their stuff, had a homebrew competition and we had a reasonably good time doing it.

There was allocated product, but no one really went without. No retailer really tried to hoard all of any given release, our customers did not buy up all of our product for their use. There was sharing, and that spirit seems to have disappeared. The changes of the industry and the drinking culture bros who go for the trophy brews over anything else, is flattening my interest.