Day: April 8, 2022

45 Days

Fandango33 Comments

I got fitted for hearing aids yesterday. Now I’ve got 45 days to decide if I like them. 45 days to retrain my brain to hear through them. 45 days to get used to them.

So far, everything sounds a bit tinny, including my own voice. I’m getting the sense of a bit of an echo chamber inside my head. And I can hear things amplified that give me pause, like the sounds of a deck of cards being shuffled when my wife and I play 500 rummy or the sound of my stream hitting the toilet water when I pee. (TMI?)

But on the other hand, I can watch TV without having to wear headphones or to have the volume up so high that it blows my wife out of the room. At the same time, I have to remind my wife that she needn’t yell at me to make herself heard. Have you ever tried telling your spouse to keep her voice down? Take my advice, don’t try that at home!

And when I go outside now I can hear birds tweeting during the day and crickets chirping at night, sounds I haven’t heard in a long time, so that’s a good thing.

I have three biweekly follow up appointments with the audiologist for adjustments and fine tuning over the next 45 days. Hopefully, those will address any kinks and give my brain the time it takes to acclimate to hearing aids.

I’ll let you know how it’s going 45 days from now.

Fibbing Friday — You Are What You Eat

Fandango12 Comments

Frank (aka PCGuy) and Di (aka Pensitivity101) alternate as hosts for Fibbing Friday, a silly little exercise where we are to write a post with our answers to the ten questions below. But as the title suggests, truth is not an option. The idea is to fib a little, a lot, tell whoppers, be inventive, silly, or even outrageous, in our responses. Today is Frank’s turn and he wants to know….

1. Why is it called “Beef Wellington”? Because the Wellington family members were all vegetarian, but they decided to name their children after foods they could not eat. Beef was the oldest, and his siblings were named Pork, Chicken, Lamb, and Veal.

2. What makes it “Yorkshire Pudding”? It’s the type of thick mud that was first encountered in the shire of York after the deluge of 1811.

3. Is there a difference between “Ketchup” and “Catsup”? Yes, they are spelled differently and pronounced differently and taste differently. Otherwise they are identical.

4. Why are the five mother sauces so named? Because each of them, members of the world renown Sauce family, had five of their own little girl Sauces, and those offspring ended up being members of the first all-female soccer team to win the World Cup.

5. Meat from cows and pigs get fancy names, but meat from chickens is just called chicken. Why? Chicken are plain, unassuming creatures, and relative to cows and pigs, are small. So they chose to categorize their cuts into just four straightforward body parts designations: breast, thigh, wing, and leg.

6. What is ratatouille? A stew made from rat meat.

7. What’s the difference between lamb and mutton? Sideburns.

8. What is beurre blanc? It’s a medical condition caused by overexposure to the bitter cold.

9. Why do some say you shouldn’t serve red wine with fish? For the same reason some say ketchup and others say catsup.

10. Why do chefs toss a pinch of salt over their shoulder? Because rats find salt irresistible, and it’s how the best chefs can ensure that they’ll have enough rats when they make their signature ratatouille dish.

Throwback Thursday — At The Movies

Fandango19 Comments

Maggie, at From Cave Walls, and Lauren, at LSS Attitude of Gratitude, alternate hosting Throwback Thursday. The idea of the prompt is for them to give us a topic and for us to write a post in which we share our own memories or experiences about the given topic. This week, Lauren chose the topic of “Going to the Movies.”

Do you remember specific times you went to indoor movies or drive in theatres?

I can’t remember the titles or dates of any specific movies, but I remember when I was a kid (maybe starting around ten years old), my mother would give me a dollar to go to the Saturday matinee at our local theater. They usually had a double feature, either horror movies, science fiction movies, or comedies. It cost 50¢ (25¢ each way) for the bus, 25¢ for a ticket to get into the theater, and 25¢ for a box of popcorn.

In my later teens, once my friends and I got driver’s licenses, we often went to the local drive-in theater on Friday or Saturday nights. It was $1.00 a carload and usually between three and five of us would pile into whichever of our parents one of us could persuade to let us use their car that night.

Do you remember the first time for either?

As I said, I don’t remember the specific movies, but I loved going to the movies and went as often as I could starting at a fairly young age.

Do you remember going with friends and not parents?

I don’t remember my parents ever taking me to the movies, but I had two older sisters who would occasionally invite me to tag along to a movie with one or both of them. But they liked either musicals or romantic movies, which I didn’t particularly care for, so most of the movies I saw were with friends.

Please share one or more experiences about going to the movies.

Lauren reminded us that this is a family-friendly blog, so I’ll be cognizant of that and spare any details that might be more than PG-rated. That said, one day when I was about 23 or 24, two girls I worked with told me they were going to the movies after work one night and asked me if I’d care to join them. I didn’t have any other plans, so I agreed. What I didn’t know was that the movie they picked out — I wish I could remember the movie’s name, but I can’t — was essentially a soft-core porn flick. At the conclusion of the movie the girls invited me to go back to the apartment of one of them. Suffice it to say that that night I experienced my first — and only, it turned out — ménage à trois.

G is for Good Will Hunting

Fandango43 Comments

For this year’s A-To-Z Challenge, my theme is MOVIES. I will be working my way through the alphabet during the month of April with movie titles and short blurbs about each movie. Today’s movie is “Good Will Hunting.”

“Good Will Hunting” was a 1997 American psychological drama film directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver and Stellan Skarsgård. The screenplay was written by Affleck and Damon.

The film received positive reviews from critics and grossed over $225 million during its theatrical run against a $10 million budget. At the 70th Academy Awards, it received nominations in nine categories, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won in two: Best Supporting Actor for Williams and Best Original Screenplay for Affleck and Damon.

The film follows 20-year-old South Boston janitor, Will Hunting (Damon), who has a genius-level IQ but chooses to work as a janitor at MIT. When he solves a difficult graduate-level math problem, his talents are discovered by Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), who decides to help the misguided youth reach his potential. When Will is arrested for attacking a police officer, Professor Lambeau makes a deal to get leniency for him if he will get treatment from therapist Sean Maguire (Robin Williams). Will becomes a patient of the therapist and studies advanced mathematics under the professor. Through his therapy sessions, Will re-evaluates his relationships with his best friend (Affleck), his girlfriend (Driver), and himself, facing the significant task of confronting his past and thinking about his future.

Rotten Tomatoes said of the movie, “It follows a predictable narrative arc, but Good Will Hunting adds enough quirks to the journey — and is loaded with enough powerful performances — that it remains an entertaining, emotionally rich drama.”

Previous A2Z 2022 posts: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — April 8th

Fandango14 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 8th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on April 8, 2018.

The Personification of Thwart

When I saw today’s one-word prompt, “thwart,” the name of the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, immediately came to mind. McConnell’s primary mission when Obama was President was to thwart everything Obama did.

Obama was elected in 2008. When McConnell became the Majority Leader in 2010, he said that his “number one priority is making sure President Obama’s a one-term president.” Fortunately for America, he failed.

In 2016, McConnell said, “One of my proudest moments was when I told Obama, ‘You will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.’”

As justification for thwarting Obama’s Constitutional right to appoint a Supreme Court Justice after the sudden death of Antonin Scalia in early 2016, McConnell said, “The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

But in January of 2017, McConnell changed his tune. When newly elected Donald Trump nominated U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s vacancy, Democratic senators vowed a fight, insisting on keeping the rule that a majority of 60 votes be required for confirmation. That’s when the man who prevented Obama from filling the Scalia’s vacancy said, “Apparently there’s yet a new standard now, which is not to confirm a Supreme Court nominee at all. I think that’s something the American people simply will not tolerate.”

Is this not the height of hypocrisy? And that is why I consider Mitch McConnell to be the personification of thwart.

Who would get your vote?