Fried "Air"

Every year, state fairs across the country vie for who can create the newest food craze. You've heard of fried ice cream, fried Coke, fried butter. Guess what I just saw on Groupon. I'm sure it will become a new craze, if I can ever understand how they can fry 'air'.

How was your Thanksgiving. Ours was very nice, spending the first part of the day with parents and the second part with kids and grandkids. We also had family in from NV and had a good time with them. Throughout the whole weekend, we ate waaaay too much. For all our blessings and challenges, though, we want to thank the Lord.

I'm not much of a cat person, but this rings true.

Quotation marks. Do you ever seem them used in a way that makes something seem suspicious? Here are a couple of examples.

My hard disk is totally full, so I cannot share any more photos until I free some space. Sorry. Hopefully, I can deal with this tonight. Have a great Monday.

A Tale of a Tale About Peanuts

Today's Jokes and Puns calendar entry:
How many cooks does it take to stuff a turkey?
Only one, but you really have to squeeze him in.

Happy Thankgsiving! Today's post is primarily one fun article about a classic animated television show. It is a story from NYMag about how A Charlie Brown Christmas almost never made it to the air.

Soon, millions of American families will come  together to celebrate the holidays and passive-aggressively debate whether the country has just been saved or destroyed. For many, one annual ritual will provide a welcome distraction: watching a depressed child get berated and mocked relentlessly. A Charlie Brown Christmas, based on the “Peanuts” comic strip, has aired every December for the last 50 years — longer than any other holiday program besides Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. For last year’s anniversary, President Obama called the special “one of the country’s most beloved traditions.”

Lee Mendelson, who produced A Charlie Brown Christmas, thinks its message might be particularly relevant this year, with at least half the population feeling like someone pulled the football away. “These people identify with Charlie Brown maybe more than ever after this election season. He keeps fighting back and keeps enduring,” Mendelson says. “If we ever have to fight bullying, at so many levels, this is it.”

What most people don’t realize is that the holiday classic barely made it into production — and was almost buried forever. In 1965, no one believed that Charles Schulz’s story of an underdog sticking to his principles in the face of constant bullying would make for good TV. The show originally sprang from a failed documentary Mendelson had tried to make about Schulz. No networks had wanted it, but after Charlie Brown and the gang were featured on the cover of Time magazine, Coca-Cola’s ad agency, McCann Erickson, got the idea for a holiday special and approached Mendelson. Desperate after his documentary imploded, he lied and told the agent that, in fact, he and Schulz had discussed such a project. He called Schulz and told him they’d sold A Charlie Brown Christmas. “Schulz said, ‘What’s that?’” Mendelson recalls. “And I said, ‘It’s something you’re going to write tomorrow.’”

Mendelson rang animator Bill Melendez, who had helped animate a two-minute segment in the never-aired documentary. The three met in Schulz’s office in Sebastopol, California. Schulz wanted the show to focus on the childhood stress of putting on a Christmas play. Mendelson had just read The Fir-Tree by Hans Christian Andersen and suggested the story include a tree that is as sad and misunderstood as Charlie Brown. They cranked out an outline and put it in a Western Union shipment to Atlanta. Several days later, the agency told them they had a short six months to deliver the animated special.

Halfway through production, when the team was still working with black-and-white illustrations, a McCann executive (Mendelson is almost certain it was Neil Reagan, the older brother of President Ronald Reagan) showed up in Sebastopol to check in on the progress. He was put off by the slow pacing of the story. Mendelson, Melendez, and Schulz assured him it would be better once there was music and color. The executive said he wouldn’t tell the agency what he thought — because if he did, he was sure they would cancel the show.

For the music, the team had courted up-and-coming jazz musician Vince Guaraldi, whose “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” seemed to strike the same balance of somber enlightenment and childlike buoyancy that Schulz achieved in his comic. But when they played the introduction song as the children skated on the frozen pond, Mendelson realized it was way too slow and solemn. It was missing something. He sat down at his kitchen table and wrote out the words to “Christmas Time Is Here” on an envelope. Guaraldi enlisted the children’s choir of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California, to sing the lyrics.

Lyrics or not, the CBS executives didn’t think jazz belonged in a cartoon. They also challenged Schulz’s decision to use untrained children instead of professional adult voice actors. They especially couldn’t understand why children would use such big words. (Lucy: “We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know.” Charlie Brown: “Don’t think of it as dust. Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization. Maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination. Maybe carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon, or even Nebuchadnezzar.”) This, despite the fact that for about 15 years, “Peanuts” characters had spoken with advanced vocabularies.

Schulz even got pushback from his own team. Mendelson suggested a laugh track would save the show and Schulz responded by standing up and walking out of the room. When Schulz, a Sunday school teacher, said Linus should recite from the Gospel of Luke, Mendelson and Melendez protested. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Well, there goes our careers right down the drain,’” Mendelson recalls. “Nobody had ever animated anything from the Bible before, and we knew it probably wouldn’t work. We were flabbergasted by it.”

Of course, now Mendelson realizes that Linus’s segment probably made the entire project work. “That 10-year-old kid who recited that speech from the Bible was as good as any scene from Hamlet,” he says.

When CBS finally saw the finished product, they were sure it was doomed. It was still too slow, there was no action, the kids weren’t polished, the jazz didn’t belong. “The general reaction was one of disappointment — that it didn’t really translate as well as we thought it would,” former CBS executive Fred Silverman said in the 2015 short documentary, The Making of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ “There were specific negative comments about the music, the piano music, some of the voicing, which sounded kind of amateurish.”

But Coca-Cola had already bankrolled the program, and it was listed in TV guides. CBS had to air the show, but the execs were certain it would flop, never to run again. Mendelson thought he had killed Charlie Brown.

When A Charlie Brown Christmas aired at 7:30 p.m. ET on December 9, 1965, half of American TV viewers tuned in. The reviews were outstanding. Washington Post TV critic Lawrence Laurent wrote, “Good old Charlie Brown, a natural born loser … finally turned up a winner.”

CBS immediately ordered four more specials. The show won a Peabody and an Emmy Award. In the end, Schulz, Mendelson, and Melendez wound up making about 50 “Peanuts” programs together, most of them for CBS. “We did whatever we wanted to do,” Mendelson says. “In our business, that’s craziness. We did one on cancer. We did one on war. We were just given a free ticket for half a century and tried to honor that by being entertaining but also being important and educational.”

The only person involved who wasn’t surprised was Schulz. The cartoonist was plagued by depression and self-doubt his entire life, but he always had confidence in his characters and their stories. He believed everyone knew what it felt like to fail despite doing everything right. “We hear about authors who write best about what they know. Steinbeck wrote about the West. Hemingway wrote about, well, everywhere,” says Mendelson. “Schulz jumped ahead in school so he was always the youngest, and he endured a lot of bullying. He felt a lot of loneliness, and I think that was the bedrock of his whole philosophy.”

Schulz’s message of perseverance in the face of dejection always resonated with American audiences, a reminder that we should keep kicking no matter how many times they pull the ball away. If that sentiment happens to be particularly relevant this year, Mendelson is pleased.

“Hopefully,” he says, “this positive program will be soothing at a time of uncertainty.”

Pretty nice story, isn't it? I know that I have seen it more times than I can count, and am looking forward to it again this year, its 51st birthday.

Pre-Thanksgiving Thanks Giving

Did you remember that yesterday was the 23rd anniversary of the assassination of President John F Kennedy? Do you believe the finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman? I guess we'll never know for sure.

If you are like me, and I know that you are not, you have wondered what the difference is between a street and an avenue and a road. No, I have never actually wondered that, but I came across a video where they explain the differences.

Funny road sign juxtaposition (good word, right?):

Cat selfie, anyone?

I was looking at Amazon last night for some heavy-duty 10ft Lightning cables for our iPhones. You know how it is when you start looking around in Amazon, though. I also want to get some additional propellers for my drone. I do not have any replacements for the silver-topped ones. I saw a sale for FPV (first-person view) goggles. So, as I dug around, it led me to Youtube for people using those goggles to fly their drones, which means you are seeing through the camera as your eyes. That led me to seeing a video about putting prop guards on my drone, which would then require some adjustment on my carrying case so the bases could remain attached. And all of this while watching Designated Survivor on television.

Up near Montrose, CO, we came across this little lake at Chipeta State Park that looked picturesque. So, I made everyone pull over while I took some photos. The first one I captured showed these cattails on the near shore. I was not able to determine if the lake itself has a name.

Zooming in on the far side revealed this small pier.

There is a walking path around this lake, with benches for those who want to sit and relax, or maybe sit and take photos.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I hope my reminders to give thanks for everything have gotten you in the spirit of the season. We really should be giving thanks more often than we do (well, maybe I am only speaking for myself. That's OK). I have so many blessings and yet, I often take them for granted. I hope that you are more cognizant of the ways God has blessed you. Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Kids and Cats and Canned Biscuits

Who doesn't love biscuits? I know that I do, although they are probably not great for me. Still, this article describes 6 ways you can use the canned ones to build a pretty tasty meal. The Monkey Bread and the Calzones look the best, although our sister-in-law made the dumplings on vacation and they were really good.

We are not through with food-related stories though. Oh no! And the reason this next one caught my eye was a sandwich that includes cheese, roasted strawberries and dark chocolate. No, I don't want to to try it. In fact, I have not eaten a grilled cheese sandwich in over 3 years, but that doesn't mean you might like some of the options in this article.

NLTD's boyfriend thinks I should look at replacing my current fitness tracker with an older Apple Watch. I haven't decided for sure to replace my tracker yet. I am just considering options because the band on my unit it looking really grubby. I mainly use it to make sure I take a minimum of 5,000 steps per day. I know that is below the recommended 10,000 steps that somebody (but I don't know who) recommends.

No, this photo is not my family, but the cat reminds me of ours. What cat, you may ask? Check the close up in the lower right.

The 16-member small group that I am leading at our Chorale is going very well. We are working on an arrangement of Silent Night that we will sing at the Christmas Party and probably as the offertory at one of the concerts.

This photo has a story. MBH and I were walking the neighborhood circle in Ouray, CO, this summer. As we neared the end, I noticed the mountain in the distance and liked the way it looked. I stopped to take this photo and a homeowner asked me why I was taking a photo of her house. I pointed out that I was shooting the peak in the distance and she allowed me to continue. I should have taken a photo of her house without telling her, but I didn't.

Later that same day, a light rain passed through and I took these shots.

Got kids? I know that you are thankful for them. Today, your assignment is to thank God for them and the blessing they are to your life. Oh, and also, turkeys. They taste really good. For me, I'm thankful for malted milk balls. Two days until Thanksgiving.

Shooting the Kids, Snacking on the Bacon, and Casserolling the Sweet Potatoes

This is a great, uplifting window ad:

I like it when signs are easy to understand.

One morning during our vacation to Colorado in October, I woke to this scene.

Five minutes, the storm increased to this.

Sadly, the snow at 14,000 ft. never made it down to us at 9,000 ft. That same morning did provide the opportunity to catch a mountain jay in our yard. I tried numerous times during the week and never caught another shot.

This road sign is clever, but I liked the commentary that accompanied it.

From the police blotter, 
or, what a beat cop deals with 
every day:
• A deputy responded to a report 
of a vehicle stopping at mailboxes. 
It was the mail carrier.
• A woman said her son was 
attacked by a cat, and the cat would not allow her to take her son to the hospital.
• A resident said someone had 
entered his home at night and taken five pounds of bacon. Upon further investigation, police discovered 
his wife had gotten up for a late-night snack.
• A man reported that a squirrel 
was running in circles on Davis Drive, and he wasn’t sure if it was sick or had been hit by a car. An 
officer responded, and as he drove on the street, he ran over the squirrel.

Thanksgiving Day is just around the corner. I am sure that many of you have (at last) two places you will visit on that day. We do. So, we will hit the folks' for the noon meal and then head over the son's place for the evening meal. I expect to be plenty full by the end of the day. After all, I am not going to pass up anything of the options at either meal. I'll make up for it on Friday. I promise. I did see this recipe for Sweet Potato Casserole on TV yesterday morning.

INGREDIENTS:
3 lbs. Yams (about 4 large or 5 medium yams, from your grocers produce dept.)
1 Stick Unsalted Butter
¼ Cup Sugar
¼ Cup Orange Juice
1 tsp. Cinnamon
1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
¼ tsp. Salt
2 Eggs (lightly beaten)
----------------------
For the Topping…
½ Cup Light brown sugar
¼ Cup (4 Tbsp.) Unsalted butter (at room temperature)
1 Cup Chopped Pecans
¼ Cup All Purpose Flour

COOKING:
1) Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Take your butter out of the fridge (1 stick for the yam mixture plus 4 Tbsp. for the topping keep separated) and let it come to room temperature while you cook the yams.
2) Poke a few holes in your yams with a fork or knife then put on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil. Bake for 75 minutes (1 hour, 15 minutes). Remove yams from the oven then turn temperature down to 350 degrees if you're cooking it right away.
3) Slice yams in half lengthwise then spoon meat away from the skin into a stand mixer or large bowl. Discard the skins*. Add 1 stick of butter, sugar, orange juice, cinnamon, vanilla & salt. Run mixer on low speed at first then increase speed as it starts coming together. After about one minute of mixing, taste it to see if you want more sugar or cinnamon. After it tastes just right, add the beaten eggs and continue mixing until you get a nice smooth consistency. If you don't have a stand mixer or hand held electric mixer, use a potato masher or large fork then a whisk to combine your ingredients. If the mixture seems a little too dry to you, add a little more orange juice. Move mixture into a casserole dish that has been coated with cooking spray or butter.
4) Make the topping by first combining brown sugar with softened butter using your hands. Toss pecans in a small bowl with the flour before adding it to the brown sugar & butter mixture. Combine these 4 ingredients together until you get a crumbled texture then sprinkle evenly over the top of your yam mixture that's in the casserole dish.
5) Bake for 30 minutes @ 350 then serve.

This recipe serves 8-10 people as a side dish.

*If you don't want to waste the skins, you can chop them up and toss with a little melted butter, sugar & cinnamon as an additional side dish.

Cooks Note: This dish won't taste nearly as good with canned yams (2 large cans), but if you do use them, be sure you drain the juices and eliminate the white sugar from the recipe since they are pre-sweetened. If you make this dish a day ahead of time, make sure you cover it then when you're ready; take it out of the fridge two hours prior to cooking so it comes closer to room temperature. Remove the cover then bake for 30 minutes @ 350 degrees.

For today, though, it will be quinoa salad, as usual. I have some grapes (with seeds) for my fruit. Maybe I will eat more carefully leading up to turkey day. No, probably not.

I hope you are already thinking of those things for which you are thankful. I know that I am. For today, make it a Marvelous Monday.

Do You Prefer Your Turkeys Stuffed or Wild?

Ingenious fixes to common problems. This first one is a cool twist on car repair.

Here's a clever way to avoid those high cable bills, but still see the quality programming you expect.

Here is a photo of a road (County Road 5?) just outside of Ridgway, CO. As you know, I am a sucker for a shot when the road leads my eye into the scene. This one is in landscape format.

And here is the same location in portrait format.

And here is a photo of some wild turkeys, but they wouldn't stand still. We could have used them for our meal next week if we could have caught them.

We are coming up on Thanksgiving. Will you be having a traditional feast with turkey (not wild), dressing, gravy, sweet potatoes, cornbread, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and pie? If so, you're in luck. The cost dropped to $49.87 for a meal feeding 10 people. I am not sure what our menu will be, but we do have a nephew and his family coming into town, so that will be a fun time.

It is Friday, so let's get going so we can get it done. Have a great weekend. Maybe we should get a running start and go ahead and start thanking God for our blessings now?

Scans and Patterns and Friday-Eve

Disclaimer: This blog is hosted on a platform, Blogger, owned by Google. Why did I feel the need to share that disclaimer? Well, they have released a new app called PhotoScan for iOS and Android, and it promises to make preserving the memories in your old printed photos much easier. And if you go to this link, you will see a gif showing how it works, and it looks really impressive. They also apparently improve their photo editing tools.

Look again at the tire.

A little Reddit discussion:

I like the patterns in the leaves in this shot. It kind of looks like they zig zag back and forth down the tree.

I like the patterns in this image of sunlight and shadow on the peaks of these mountains.

Well, I am a bit nervous about the first two cabinet appointments from President-Elect Trump. I hope (and pray) that he will surround himself with wise advisors.

We went to the grocery store and bought some fresh fruit last night, and I picked up some figs. They are packaged and won't be as sweet as fresh-off-the-tree fruit, but I do like them. And they bring pleasant memories of the tree behind my great-grandmother's house in Ringgold, La.

Well, as I write this on Wednesday night, it is now bedtime because we were at my folks' house for our weekly meal and Survivor night. And I have been posting less each day since I started my new job. I hope that's OK.

Just two more workdays this week. Sure, I like my job, but time off on weekends is still nice. Have a great Thursday.

A Map, A Mat, A Moon and Math

You may have heard before that maps of the world are not entirely accurate on scale. Most maps are based on the Mercator projection, a schema that distorts the scale of many countries because it enlarges nations as they get farther from the Equator. While helpful in some cases, this doesn’t give travelers a totally accurate vision of the Earth’s spatial layout. In a Mercator map, Greenland looks the size of Africa, Alaska seems bigger than Brazil, and Antarctica appears as an infinite, frozen nightmare. Now, a Japanese designer has come up with Authagraph World Map. His map overcomes 2D distortions by angling continents in a way that accurately displays both their relative sizes and the distances between them. Here it is. What do you think?

I just might be looking for this doormat. If you don't get it, you're probably too young.

My better half had me go outside last night and look at the supermoon. It was pretty cool, but there are no fun settings in which to take a photo around here. Did you check it out? I think this won't happen again for 20 years or so. If you forgot or were too busy watching TV, these people have a solution for you...and you don't have to wait 20 years.

Seeing the gold and red on trees in the Fall is so much fun. When the sun is shining on them, it can take your breath away. However, it doesn't last long enough. Luckily, if you are around soon enough after the leaves begin to fall, there is still a kind of beauty around them, especially with the aspen and their white trunks. Look at this scene.

The gold at the tops and bottoms of trees is still nice.

And even with only a few leaves left, I still like the aspen colors.

Let's leave today with a creative answer to a math question. Did you hate those tests in school? If only we could all have been this imaginative (or is it just smart-aleckiness?).

Thanks for reading today. I hope you come back again soon. Have a Wonderful Wednesday.

The EYES Have It

During the later part of his life, Claude Monet developed cataracts in his eyes which prevented him from seeing colors clearly. The painter tried various treatments to no avail. In 1923, at the age of 82, he opted to have the lens of his left eye completely removed. Judging by the paintings he produced after the procedure, it may have enabled him to see ultraviolet light. The two paintings you are looking at are from Claude Monet’s 1922-1924 series The House Seen From the Rose Garden. The red and yellow version is painted as seen through his left eye, limited to the wavelengths allowed by his cataract. The painting on the right is deep blue and violet, as seen through an eye with no lens.

Did I show you this before?

We came up on a valley just outside of Ridgway, CO, this fall and I liked the look of this fence at the end of the road.

Just like I did in yesterday's photos, I decided to see if zooming into the scene would help its composition. I think that it did.

OK, but which is this landscape framing better than the first one above? I like the fence and road better, but I miss the colors of the first image. While I like this one, I guess I still have to rank it #3.

Do you like this parking sign? Does it worry you that a surgeon can be in and out in 5 minutes?

Not really much to say today. So, go ahead and quit reading now. Anything that I write after the prior sentence isn't really worth your time. So, let's get our Tuesday on.

Pandiculation and The Master of Space and Time

Today's entry from the Bad Jokes and Puns calendar:
Mary Poppins got a job as a restaurant reviewer for the local paper. At her first gig, she ordered cauliflower with cheese and a side of scrambled eggs, which she reviewed thusly: “Super cauliflower-cheese but eggs were quite atrocious.”

The alarm goes off and your eyes open. What's the first thing you do? If you're like me, you have a good stretch. This instinctual action is called pandiculation, and it does wonders for rebooting your body. You can learn more about it here.

Have you ever heard of "The Master of Space and Time"? If a person could manipulate both of those, surely they would never die, right? Well, that turned out not to be true. Leon Russell passed away in his sleep on Sunday at the age of 74. I first heard of him in college from a roommate, Jim Morris, and have been a fan ever since. His most famous song was "A Song For You." By the way, from the research I have done, his nickname of "The Master of Space and Time" came from a line in that famous song that reads "I love you in a place where there’s no space or time...." RIP, Leon.

I took a series of three photos of this scene, each one at a different zoom level. I was not sure which one would best capture the best feel of the colors surrounding the huge rock in the center. Which one do you prefer? Probably, the closest focus is the most effective for me.

I found these two related photos and snickered at the similarity of how we each react in these situations.

This is clever.

We returned from a weekend out of town last night. More on that in days to come. For today, though, I've shared enough. We are just a couple of weeks away from Thanksgiving, so let's all focus on those things for which we should be thankful. I know that we should think about this all the time, as it says in Ephesians 5, "Giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."