Just like my $500 2nd car mentioned earlier–diseased urine factory paint job with the finish long gone and all! Except this one is way less banged up around the front end than mine was when I got it ca. 1992. (A large part of why I got it so cheap. Had to replace the front bumper myself.)
Also minus the neon green dual windshield wipers I added, because you may as well go full goblin style with a machine like this! The wipers were actually bought to match a Halloween goblin bucket mascot for trash 🤗
Surprised I found any photos of those, tbh. Mine was named Kevin, as part of some joke I don’t even remember now. But, shame Kevin isn’t still around too. He was a good mascot.
Not the most attractive vehicle ever–or fastest, with the shitty automatic transmission gearing on that one–but I do kinda miss it. It did keep going until my dad managed to kill it around 2005.
Because I can’t bake for myself, and my Housemate / aide is Conventional, and doesn’t really like to put effort into cooking. So I’m telling you all, so you can enjoy it in my place. (I want my mother to be remembered as awesome by people after I’m gone):
Brownie Cake!
My mom would bake “Brownies Cockaigne” from the 1964 edition of “Joy of Cooking” (recipe behind the cut, below). Then she would bake the brownie batter in two 9 inch round pans, And for “Frosting,” she would spread full-on whipped cream (made with heavy cream, of course, and just the tiniest bit of sugar and vanilla).
And that’s it– though sometimes, she would put a ring of macerated strawberries (berries allowed to sit with sugar, until they leak their own juice and make a sauce) on top.
No fancy-dancy decorated cake made to look like a giant whatever will ever be better than brownies smothered in whipped cream. No matter how slick they look in video thumbnails.
(If you’re too intimidated by the idea of melting unsweetened chocolate in a double boiler, and don’t have the spoons to whip cream into soft peaks, I’m sure a brownie mix from a box and carbonated cream from a nozzle would be almost as good… ‘Cause it’s still Brownies and whipped cream).
Oh, it was! And it looked impressive, too, when you sliced into it, and saw the dark, almost black, brownies layered with the white whipped cream.
When I was a little kid, having this at home, going to neighbors’ houses and being served brownies with chocolate frosting just seemed wrong. Still does. With me, it’s either Brownies plain, or brownies with whipped cream.
I hadn’t thought of doing that, but it sounds really good. I was never a fan of any kind of icing on brownies, maybe especially chocolate. But, the whipped cream contrast seems like it would work a lot better.
That contrast actually reminds me of one thing my mom used to make sometimes, including for my birthday a few years: a super rich, not overly sweet chocolate cake with White Mountain Frosting. (A fluffy meringue-type.)
Don’t necessarily see myself having the spoons to fool with any type of cooked icing anytime soon, but whipped cream would probably be about as good with a lighter rich chocolate cake.
For whatever reason, this stuff turned into a Halloween tradition when I was little. Either La Choy or the now-defunct Chun King mentioned in that piece. Load the kid up on dubious “Chinese” food before heading out trick or treating.
I get the feeling that this may have started precisely because it was so quick and easy, with a busy night ahead. But, I thought it was awesone–partly because we so rarely got convenience foods like that at home, other than some canned soups. Party time! 🙄
(The smallish city where we lived then also did not get its first Chinese restaurant until around 1980. How things have changed…)
My mom always served this stuff up with rice, and the peculiar crispy noodles as a garnish. Plus plenty of soy sauce on the side, because you really needed something to add flavor.
Reminded of this earlier, so tonight the plan again is our own Halloween “Chinese” feast at home 🤗 The closest I am willing/able to go is some quick basic Beef Lo Mein, using whatever suitable vegetables we have lurking in the fridge.
Though, I did find this in the cupboard, and I may have to slice up a few to add. Closest we’re going to get to classic ‘70s style fare, but it’s the thought 😉
college professor just said “you’re probably too young to even remember this” and brought up something that happened in 2011
Better than my professer that said we’d “probably recognize this from Saturday morning cartoons” then showed us a cartoon from 1935…
New immortal vs. old immortal
To be fair, perhaps Professor Old Immortal is of an age to have stopped watching Saturday Morning Cartoons sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s. Back then, the old cartoons from the 1930s and ‘40s were sometimes part of the mix – it was cheap and easy for the networks to just air the cartoons that used to be shown in movie theaters before the main features, and stick there commercials between them.
Here’s the intro to a 1980s reboot of a show I remember watching in the 1970s (back then, it was the “Bugs Bunny and Daffy Show,” instead of “Bugs Bunny and Tweety” – They reused the main opening song, though, and just stuck Tweety in at the end.
This theme song still makes me think “Saturday Morning!!” 40 years later:
They were definitely on weekday afternoons a lot in the late ‘70s-mid ’80s that I remember. TBS in particular ran a lot of classic cartoons that I would watch after school in the early-mid ’80s. Saw a lot from that time period.
I don’t actually remember as many mixed into the Saturday morning cartoon lineups, but there were obviously some. It also doesn’t seem unlikely that someone might mentally bundle the kids’ cartoon time slots together, with the Saturday morning cartoons being the main deal for a long time.
It’s probably just as well there aren’t any Dairy Queens here. Because now I’m craving their chili dogs, “lunch with my Grandaddy” style 🙄
Alabama were, without question, the biggest country artists of the 1980s. They were the #1 country artists for singles & albums combined, according to Billboard, in 1983-85, and were #2 in ‘81, ‘82, and ‘86. They had the #1 country album of the year twice in the decade, and twice they placed three albums in the year’s top 10. And of 29 singles they charted on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles in the 1980s, a full 27 of those hit #1, including, at one point, 21 in a row. That’s insane. That kind of dominance is MJ-with-the-Bulls levels of crazy. But. Alabama only (“only”) placed in the year-end artist top 10 from 1981-89. There’s one artist who placed in the top 10 every single year of the decade, as high as #2 (in 1984) and never lower than #8 (‘89). Said artist also charted 29 singles through the decade, with all but three making the top 10, including eight #1s. And at one point in the 1982, he had eight albums on the Top Country Albums chart, simultaneously. Let that sink in for just a second: at the time, the chart only had 75 positions, and he had 8 of them, or almost a full 11% of the chart. That’s domination.
Said artist is Hank Williams, Jr. – and he accomplished all of these feats without even remotely crossing over to a pop (non-country) audience. His highest-charting album on the pop album chart during this stretch was 1987’s Born to Boogie, which made it to #28. And his only appearances on the Hot 100 were way back in 1964, when he was essentially performing Hank Williams, Sr. karaoke.
I’m fascinated by Hank Jr. because he was so dominant, and simultaneously (albeit increasingly as the years have gone on) so problematic. As time has worn on, he’s become increasingly, loudly xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and homophobic. There were flickers of this at his commercial peak in the ‘80s (as I’ll discuss), but nothing near what they’ve become now. But he can’t just be dismissed, because he was also hugely influential – but sadly, much of that influence seems to have been swept under the rug thanks to his ugly politics. (The best accounting of his influence, and its confluence with his problematicism, can be found in my friend David Cantwell’s New Yorker profile of Jr. from 2 years ago; consider it your homework for this week.) And on top of that, not only was he incredibly popular and influential; Hank Jr. was also one of the finest country artists the ‘80s had to offer, synthesizing all sorts of musics into his country. He could do blues, he could do ragtime, he could get jazzy, and his sweetest spot was Southern/country-rock of the Lynyrd Skynyrd variety.
Today the Country Music Hall of Fame announced their 2018 slate of inductees, and many think thought this could finally be Jr.’s year. Others feel that, thanks to his history of public bigotry, he may never get into the Hall until after his death. Criminally, he was left on the outside looking in yet again. What no one can dispute, however, is that he belongs there, just as much as his Daddy before him. Over the course of the next week-plus, my mission is to show you what makes/made him great and just why he should be considered part of the country music pantheon, focusing on (but not limited to) his prime decade, the 1980s, of which he was the indisputable country king.
As for me, I’m Thomas Inskeep, a popular music critic in my late 40s, who’s been sharing my thoughts on music since I first wrote, way back in 8th grade, for Pages by Pages, my junior high newspaper (shout out to Manchester Junior High School in North Manchester, IN, my hometown). I’m a native Hoosier and former radio DJ who’s been a Californian for almost 15 years, and just to make things that much more problematic around my love of Hank, Jr.’s work, I’m also a queer man. I was a Staff Writer for Stylus Magazine back in 2005-07 (RIP), have written for Seattle Weekly and SPIN, and presented at the 2016 Pop Conference (on Hall & Oates, in case you’re interested). I also write and am a selector for The Singles Jukebox, and I blog semi-regularly at Oh Manchester, So Much to Answer For, my blog home since 2002.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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