The original “Car Talk” sequence from 1991 ran for five days; here are the final two installments. We’ll miss you, Tom! Someone mentioned that there’ve been other “Car Talk” comic strips within A&J. I think I do recall one strip in which it was mentioned, but I can’t remember any specifics. Whatever it was, it wasn’t as much fun as the cartoons we’ve been seeing this week. I’m glad many of you have enjoyed it, and it’s on to something else next week.
141 responses to “No Last Names, Please!”
Here it is Sunday morning AGAIN as Forrest Gump would say. I got up unwillingly due to small dog licking my face and meowing cats, especially the one who had spent night outside in the laundry room with large elderly dog. I have garlic cheese biscuits in oven for mama, honey dew, orange juice, coffee and am getting ready to scramble her some bacon-cheese eggs.
Anyone want to come for breakfast? I am having a diet Coke and my tranquilizer!
Remembered I had stuck two Cokes in freezer and not taken them out. This was at about 5 a.m. so figured no use getting up, they had already exploded. Which they HAD. Also a quote from Forrest Gump!
Have to start paging Mama for breakfast. Good morning and lets have a nice day Village!
Love, Jackie
On today’s real-time strip: men are such mushy sentimentalists; that’s why we love you so. And you can be distracted with a touch…also why we love you. Not that we’d ever take advantage of it or anything.
Invitation for all to lunch. Slow cooker pork roast, rice and gravy, green beans and Yukon gold potatoes from garden and bacon corn bread.
I need slow cooker lessons from Ghost or somebody. I have never used them before and am trying to learn to do stuff in them to cut down on cooking time/stress. Not sure it is working! I put on pork for 8 hours yesterday to be ready last night. I ate some and served Mama some, didn’t seem tender enough so I cooked it some more overnight and then continued it this morning, so the darn thing has been cooking for over 12 hours!
No wait, that is 24 hour pork roast!
Green beans are getting pulled out of garden and we may get one more chance at the pole beans before next week’s cold weather hits us. I will say we have gotten our money’s worth in enjoyment out of the garden so far. I am eye balling another bed but I have to go measure off space for the guest house to fit in before I take it all up in garden!
Ok, so I can buy vegetable futures for what I spend on this but my Mama is 93 years old. How much enjoyment can I offer? Her doctors say to not let her up in any deer stands now.
Love, Jackie
Denise! Stop outing us like that. đ
On the bright side, Edda on 9CL is wearing a bikini that leaves her 97% naked. (Of course I did the math. What do you think?)
Jackie must live in a restaurant to eat that much so often.
Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets, like that at West Point, has a system of demerits that can be awarded to cadets for not meeting proper standards. The slang term for getting a demerit at A&M was “getting gigged” (like a frog) and giving one out was “gigging” someone. As the term was in popular use on campus, it was eventually applied to cheering on the team. When the Aggies look to “gig” their opponents, it is more akin to that done to the poor frogs…
Regarding le Français: my French teacher never allowed English to be spoken in class. It is a surprise to me how much is still on active duty… so much so that when there are subtitles on a French film, I can spot inaccuracies in the translation. Example: when the angry young lady tells her date to “Mangez merde!”, it is not accurate to translate that as “Shut up!” đ
And yeah, for the rest, I cheat. “Je triche!” đ
Jackie, I do pork loins in my slow cooker in 8 hours on low setting. Even a corned beef brisket, a cut not known for its tenderness, comes out fork-tender in that length of time. Unless your cooker is malf’ing, I can’t understand why any cut of pork would take much longer than that to cook.
Any one who has been in any of the uniformed services should know what a “gig line” is. Hint: Has nothing to do with catching frogs.
Jackie feeds her workmen if they are here, as is my rock guy. It is a trick I learned a long time ago. If they are there/here, feed them and do NOT let them go out for lunch! You will save money and employee time in the long run.
I stick any leftovers in fridge and housekeeper and mama eat on them. Housekeeper is worse cook in the world. Workmen leave and go eat elsewhere to escape her cooking, unless it is leftovers!
Back when I was in business of capturing large corporate buyers I used Southern hospitality to good advantage. I picked them up at the airport, drove them to the hotel I put them up in, drove them to my showroom where we fed them any necessary meals, whether it was breakfast, lunch or dinner. Turned it into a big party type experience. And private.
In the Dallas gift market you are lucky to get 30 minutes time from a large corporate buyer. I put my showroom elsewhere and often had them stay 10 or more hours. Or a couple days. This is unheard of, actually.
Cooking is a handy thing. Southern women are always shoving food at someone! I just ate cornbread and diet Coke for lunch!
Love, Jackie
Afternoon Villagers and Giggers.
GR6, I still check my gig line when dressing. I agree on meat timed in slow cooker. We do ribs in the cooker too. I put a foil liner in the crook to hold the rubbed ribs, add liquid smoke under the liner. Saves on having a smoker.
‘Example: when the angry young lady tells her date to âMangez merde!â, it is not accurate to translate that as âShut up!â ‘ OK, this is obvious censorship. But it can happen innocently.
When the KJV translators translated the Greek ‘Woman at the well’ story into English, they translated the Greek word for word ‘. . . is not your husband’ [I don’t pretend to know what the Greek words were] into the English ‘. . . is not your husband’. So what can possibly be wrong with that?
The word order is not normal Greek. In Greek, the noun normally precedes the adjective: ‘not husband your.’ E.g., as in French ‘le train bleu’ rather than ‘the blue train.’ But to emphasize an adjective’s importance, they put it before the noun. The KJV translators either didn’t know this, or knew not what to do about it. Today, we might write ‘not YOUR husband’ to emphasize that this divorcee or widow is sleeping with someone ELSE’S husband.
Neither is breaking Torah, by the way. A married man is not forbidden to sleep with an unmarried non-virgin, nor is she forbidden to sleep with a married man. The story is not about a slut; it’s about the ‘living water.’ This non-Jew, BTW, a woman, is the first person [we are told] to whom J. states that he is the Messiah [if he really did]. Maybe I’ve recounted this before. It’s from a talk by an ELCA pastor or prof.
In keeping with the above post, I will state that as a teen I got to play “The Woman at the Well” in a religious pageant. Then later I got to be Mary Magdalene and even later I got to play Salome in a touring Passion Play until “Jesus” said to get rid of the scene stealing slut!
Can’t remember why Salome was in a scene with Jesus but I remember the costume which looked a lot like the one worn by Jeannie in “I Dream of Jeannie”.
There is a pattern there, obviously!
Love, Jackie
Jackie, I also cooked a bone-in pork roast in my slow cooker last night. I used the 10 hour low setting and it pulled easily off the bone. I chopped some and have added some vinegar based barbeque sauce to have for dinner. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the rest. I baked some sweet potatoes and made cole slaw to accompany my first attempt at barbecue. Alas, my little pole beans I was growing succumbed to the frost we had a few days ago. I’ll try again in the spring. On the other hand, my carrots are almost ready to start harvesting? :).
I’ve often thought that I had more success with a slow cooker than some of my friends because our first one (a wedding present in 1978) was not the more famous brand but one with a feature called “Auto Shift”. It would cook on High for a couple of hours and then shift itself to Low – kind of like in regular stovetop cooking where you bring something to a boil and then lower it to simmer.
We finally had to replace it a couple of years ago but could not find one with that feature; most of them claim to be programmable but that seems to include only cooking time and keeping warm time. Now we just make the shift ourselves, which cuts into the convenience factor.
The total time required when you do it this way falls about halfway between what the recipe says for time on entirely High and time entirely on Low.
Man, to have a slow cooker that behaves so well. I received a brand new Hamilton -Beech ginormous slow cooker several years ago now on Christmas. Low is “very hot,” medium is “almost boiling,” and hot is “will burn everything to a crisp in four hours.” I have relegated it to stock/broth cooking.
Ruth Anne, we replaced our cooker three years back. Went with the $29 low end model. Has three manual settings: high, low, and warm. I start things on high for an hour, just set any time in the house, turn to low and go about work. Come dinner time foods ready.
Today is 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. What a day that was. Had spent my adult life in the struggle against communism, never expected it to end in a whimper. Two years latter the military stood down from alert for first time in over forty years.
Travel in the former eastern block today and you will see the decaying past. Abandoned collective farm communes, military bases with rotting equipment still in place
Factories in decay, and Linen and Marx statues in obscure corners.
Lenin, not linen. First computer just posted in mid sentence, now this; all after a major gig last evening. đ
Sandcastler, I was one of the escorts for a Boy Scout trip to Berlin for a historical trail a couple of months before the wall came down. We took the duty train from Frankfurt to Berlin. I always maintained the those boys were one of the reasons the wall came down. I usually referred to them as NATO’s secret weapon.
Chris, Boy Scouting in the military community always make for unusal field trips. My first experience on an actual submarine of the line was when we took a troop to visit a British port. Not sure if any scouts ever joined the navy; sure if they did the pinups were a recruiting enticement. Luckly for the Scout Master, the Chaplin wasn’t tagging along that day.
Thanks, sand! Here I was thinking I was the only one automatically checking my gig line [mumble-mumble] years after leaving the service. đ
Yep, two slow cookers, both with three heat settings and the lid clamps and rubber gasket lids so they can be used to transport what you’ve cooked in them, a feature much loved by my all-female staff on the days I decide to feed them lunch.
Chris, Mikhail Gorbachev said Saturday that tensions between the major powers have pushed the world closer to a new Cold War. I suppose this is what can happen when we start thinking that what goes on in the rest of the world doesn’t really affect us.
GR6, there is now a line of slow cookers that you can daisy chain to save on number of outlets. Think you would need an uber amp breaker.
Disclaimer – I know the following post is going to make me sound like a stark raving nutter. I do not care. You have been warned.
I need a minion. I accepted moving to a house would involve more personal responsibility. I accepted lawn care, scraping car windows, shoveling snow, even battling bugs. HOWEVER, one small detail boils my blood, and sends me into a private Ed Crankshaft rage at the mere thought of it – trash day. I am 100% certain I took out trash at least once for “trash day” when I lived at home, so the concept is not foreign, but it’s been almost twenty years since I have *had* to have my trash ready for pick up on a specific day. Irrational, I know. But there is a tiny, yet extremely vocal, part of my brain ranting against being told when to put out, where to put, and in what container, and how said container must sit, regarding refuse removal. I am overly harsh to my rubbish bin. I tend to kick it when I finish lugging it to the alley – mainly because I wait until way after dark to drag it out, and cannot see the flat-ish space where it will not fall over AND sit out of the alley. So I wrestle this over-sized hunk of plastic, privately fuming against the dark, weeds, trash, humanity, uneven surfaces, and my procrastination. I have only done this insane ritual twice since moving in. The first time, someone stole one of the bins. Now, I will have to succumb to the will of the evil refuse overlords on a semi-regular basis. This just will not do. I need a minon.
I wrote something about my daughters thinking I should feed my sea of sailors with slow cookers and giving me a passel of them.
But the wiring/plugs in their dad’s boat shop where I set up food kept blowing out with all the appliances trying to run at once.
Funny he could run all these big saws and drills, etc. but the toasters and grills and griddles blew the circuits. So, I never really used them.
The pork butt ended up being good, produced a lot of broth/gravy which was best part eaten on rice more like a soup or stew. There is enough to feed housekeeper, mom and workmen tomorrow if the man delivering the truck load of dirt doesn’t join us for lunch!
I will try again with another type of meat tomorrow after I go see what I have in freezer.
Love, Jackie
MfI, purinsumphobia.
Mindy, I have a nice raised refuse/bin holder that sits in front of my house and holds four square cans. It took me 20 years and 48 years of marriage to get one. It is attractive although he never got the door built that covers said cans. I can leave the cans there all the time. They do not recycle here.
My minion, my housekeeper who I just cut back on days working (?) walks out there across a large expanse with one trash bag per trip. I own several wagons for carrying things to avoid strain in lifting and carrying. They will hold several bales of trash and 350# in weight.
I pay by the hour, so a trip for each bag from each room does add up, I suppose! See, minions are not always the answer. But I agree, they sure are better than kicking the can.
No, I do not think you are nuts at all.
Love, Jackie