Today, another sleeping-cat Sunday from the archives of Arlo & Janis. And more about wine. Prohibition understandably was hard on vintners. Many vineyards ripped out vines of grapes more suitable for wine and replaced them with grapes good for eating or for juices and jams, such as Concord grapes. This practically destroyed a long-established wine industry in the Ozarks and in New York. These regions relied heavily upon “my” grape, the Norton, said to be the only native North American grape that will produce a decent dry wine. Just now are the Norton wines really coming back in Missouri and Arkansas. My favorite prohibition story, true or not, is about desperate grape growers who would ship their produce to consumers with instructions such as, “Do not mash these grapes into juice, add yeast and store for several months in a cool dark place. It will turn into wine!”
245 responses to “More Cat in the Sack”
I suppose my first clue that I had too many cable channels was that with 300 of them to watch, the best thing on to watch at any given time was usually a rerun of The Big Bang Theory.
Jackie, I know you said you were swearing off TV for the time being, but I hope you didn’t swear off of us, too.
TR, who me? The best looking man I have ever seen? Nah, couldn’t be. Nigh, night, all
Lilyblack – EXCELLENT taste. 🙂 Episode where Booth falls into the crime scene and later gets wheeled around on a gurney wearing only boxers and socks … sigh.
Early day and I couldn’t fall asleep for anything last night. Hopefully all of employees are on the mend; everyone seems to be sick right now. One of my assistants spend several hours in ER on Tuesday. My other assistant stopped in with a friend who works at a local hospital a couple hours before her shift began – Assistant one said, “Good you are here, please have your friend take me to the ER,” and she left. She ended up being severely dehydrated and her sugar was north of 400. My two third shift guys seem to be swapping a bug back and forth, and my last employee is on heavy restrictions from workman’s comp and has ALSO been ill.
I also have no idea how the two assistants are going to get along when I’m off next week; not only do they not get along, the one who *should* know when something is off, doesn’t, and the other realizes when something is wrong, but doesn’t know how to fix it. If you all hear a loud scream early on the morning of the 31st, just know it’s me discovering the extent of the disaster. Off to work.
Off on my run. You all have a great day
Gah, another cat joke in the daily. Where is everybody?
oh, just sitting here ordering the coffee cups and toilet paper at work
Seems we have some mildly lecherous females on board here.
I love mildly lecherous females.
For today’s real-time cartoon, I was going to repeat the old comedy bit about “how can a cat be finicky about what it eats when it licks its own butt”, but I don’t feel like doing that much typing.
I’m about to be on my way to take my Mom to a clinic for a medical appointment. One of the providers there and I have a relationship that is currently on hiatus. That won’t be awkward at all.
Passez une bonne journée.
Sent an email earlier to Jackie, no reply yet. Hopefully she’s just busy working on the upcoming Sail Oklahoma event. Slow news day in Austin, thankfully.
No public officials indicted today then, David?
Nope. The DA must be drunk. Again 😛
Speaking of indictments, whichever government official authorized the confirmation of our failed rescue of American hostages in Syria should be indicted. You should never, never, never publicly reveal or even confirm anything of intelligence value and/or anything that can get our people or their HUMINT resources killed.
I won’t be holding my breath while waiting for news of that indictment, however.
If the former you-know-who, now probably in an undisclosed foreign country, never got indicted, then no one higher than the governor of Texas will be. BTW, we in Florida need to know how to do that.
“Traditionally, of course, the grand jury was seen as the major bar to prosecutorial overreaching. The effectiveness of this approach may be seen in the longstanding aphorism that a good prosecutor can persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.*
“* The phrase, made famous in Tom Wolfe’s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, apparently originates with New York City federal judge Sol Wachtler in a lunchtime interview with a reporter from the New York Daily News. Barry Popik, “Indict a ham sandwich,” Big Apple (July 15, 2004)”
Samwise Gangee battled Shelob the spider with the Phial of Galadriel and Sting. I battled her little sister today with slightly more *ahem* modern weapons: bottle of glass cleaner and an aluminium baseball bat. This thing was huge, and knew I was engaging it in battle. Even after I bashed it to bits, I spent an agonizing forty-five minutes waiting for my clerk to come in and clean up the mess. (One small perk of being the boss.) I was loath to turn my back to it, half convinced it was going to pull a Terminator me and reform when my back was turned. (It was that damn big.)
Debbe – Hope you stayed relatively dry today. In other news that surprised exactly no one, the roof of the store still leaks.
I care about the people they hurt, and certainly not the politicians. Most politicians are like cockroaches…shine a light on them and they just scurry off to a different dark place to hide. We’ll never be rid of those.
But it’s gotten so bad now that a very partisan and left-of-center writer I follow recently said, “**** ALL these *******s.”
Come on, Lady Mindy; it wasn’t really THAT big, was it? And glass cleaner? What, did you shine up the bat before taking it to the ginormous arachnid? 🙂 Next time, use WD-40. The solvent in it should have a pretty immediate and adverse affect on the eight-legged horrors. Works on wasps, too. And cockroaches. Just not on politicians.
I am the one at the office who is called on to deal with arachnids (“Get Susie! She’s not afraid of the things.”) since nobody wants to bother The Boss Of Our Lives. I usually just get the broom and sweep them out the back door. Once when it was a Black Widow, I put an empty jalapeno jar over it, (her?) slid a piece of cardboard under it, and flushed her. Usually I like spiders, they kill flies and mosquitoes and lamp bugs, but I draw the line at black widows and brown recluses. Curiously, though we treat an average of ten brown recluse bites a year, I have never seen a live one.
Bryan mentioned no longer brewing his own beer due to the number of microbreweries now operating. Here’s an interesting concept for those of us without access to nearby craft brewers.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/mobile-canning-firms-boost-craft-beer-into-mainstream-1408558265?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth
Lady Mindy, Raid roach spray also works well and you don’t have to be so close. We’d get spiders 5-6″ across (not just the daddy-long-legs kind neither, more like a Shelob version of brown recluse), kept a can in several areas of the old homestead so I wouldn’t have to go far. As long as I hit it at least once, the spider was a goner.
Y’all know those old drop ceilings, made of Styrofoam or something? Raid melts it. Oh well, got rid of the spider! If they stay outside I am happy to admire them. Come into my house- well, another story.
Ghost and Llee – It was a blitz attack, and I went with first available weapons. It was like Llee described, 5″-6″ (NOT fully stretched out), and bulbous in back. Bleh! The store is lousy with spiders, mostly icky yellow/white/greenish things. Quick, but okay to kill with a shoe. I wouldn’t have tried it with this one today – it would have ran up my leg. Llee, thanks for the tip about raid and ceiling tiles; mine have a hard enough time staying in one piece as it is.
There is another one I am fighting with at the new place – fortunately, it was between screen and window, and I was able to force it to go out and not into the porch area with me (Not that it didn’t try.) Had it actually made it in, I would have surrendered the porch until I had more firepower.
Oh, and I have a standing policy that if something has eight or more legs, I reserve the right to kill it if said bug gets too close to my personal bubble.
https://fbcdn-photos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/t1.0-0/10629718_10152646196384648_1866656567758127730_n.jpg
And in case there be tarantulas…
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/news/2004/images/mushroom_web.jpg
Actually I would reserve that for these guys. (Fair warning – DO NOT WATCH IF YOU DO NOT LIKE SPIDERS!)
Spiders living in groups in Congo: http://youtu.be/DQchOsAMj1c
Look out!! Here he comes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oRRBPdM6Wc
I’m normally calm around spiders and willing to transport them to a safe place PROVIDING I see them first at a distance. Those that suddenly crawl across myself or through my personal space are doomed.