Sunday Stealing

Another week, another quiz! Let’s see how this goes:

The 2×4 Meme

TWO foods you can’t stand

1. Broccoli! I’ve written before of my hatred for broccoli.

2. I love potatoes in just about every form in which they can be served…except mashed. I do not like mashed potatoes. And I always think I should! Every time I see a nice serving of mashed potatoes with delicious gravy, I think, “Ooh, that’s gotta be good….” And yet…no dice. I cannot get myself to love mashed potatoes.

FOUR foods you love

1. Blueberries. They’re heavenly. One of my favorite breakfasts is a cup or so of cottage cheese with a cup or so of blueberries on top.

2. Eggs. Eggs always make me happy. And they’re so versatile!

3. Bread. I don’t think there’s a bread I don’t like, and that can be a problem, I must admit.

4. Mustard. Spicy, brown, yellow, yellow with horseradish, dijon, honey, the stuff with the big seeds in it that you dip pretzels into, the spicy stuff in the little packet that I must have with my egg roll when order from Asian Star…yeah. Mustard!

TWO places you never want to see again 

1. Las Vegas. Now, given that when I saw Vegas I was 7 years old as we drove through it while moving from West Virginia to Hillsboro, OR, in 1979, a case can be made that I really haven’t seen Vegas, at least, not what it’s become. The Vegas I saw bears little resemblance to what’s there now. But still! No desire to go there whatsoever. I am not interested. I don’t gamble, and Vegas is an entirely artificial place that got plunked there for gambling. There is no natural geographic reason for there to be a city there. You can see this from aerial photos where the city doesn’t dwindle from urban core to suburbs to rural the way cities are supposed to; Vegas just stops. Now, a Vegas episode from the last season of Somebody Feed Phil did the best job I’ve seen yet of making Vegas look like a place I might like, but…no. Would I turn down a free, all-expenses-paid trip there? No! But do I have any intention of devoting any of my travel time or resources to going there? Also no. (Mark Evanier writes about Vegas. He likes it much more than I do, and his opinion has the virtue of him actually having been there since 1979.)

2. For the foreseeable future? Florida.

FOUR places you’d like to revisit

1. Hawaii!

2. New York City!

3. Chicago!

4. Seattle! (These aren’t arranged in preference, but by how long it’s been since I’ve been to any of them. It’s been 4 years since Hawaii, this December; 10 years this November since NYC; 24 or so since Chicago (and that was a drive-by); 43 or so since the last time I saw Seattle.

TWO musical artists who make you want to change the station 

1. Toby Keith. I’m told his early stuff was quite good before he went all “Lee Greenwood’s Republican Country heir-apparent”, but I’ll never know.

2. It depends on the song, but sometimes Rush bugs me. “Tom Sawyer” is a frankly unpleasant thing to listen to.

FOUR musical artists you love to listen to

1. The Beatles! Longtime readers will know that I was not always a Beatles fan, but I came around quickly when I started listening to them with new ears after watching the movie Across the Universe.

2. The Killers. I missed them when they were first getting big (in the 2000s), but I’ve been listening to them quite a bit the last couple of years, particularly their live album taken from a concert they did at the Royal Albert Hall in London. I love their sound and their combination of tech-dance, pop, and even yacht rock with saxophone styles.

3. Glen Campbell. He’s a part of the soundtrack of my life.

4. Annie Lennox. Her voice is a miracle. She could turn the Alphabet Song into a work of art. She probably has!

TWO moments you’d like to erase

1. The 2016 and 2024 elections. Yeah, a two-fer, but seriously: when they write the story of how America might have done herself in and done so voluntarily, those are going to be the moments she did it.

2. I don’t want to write about the details–not now, maybe not ever–but my mother did not deserve for her last year to unfold the way it did. At all. (Though honestly, seeing the 2024 election turn out the way it did would not have done her any favors.)

FOUR moments you’d like to relive

1. 2008’s election…but honestly, with a lot stronger sense of keeping the foot on the gas. America’s progressives had a serious chance there to change things for good and for better…but they just said “Mission accomplished!” after that election and retreated to their napping chambers, allowing the Tea Party to rise up and set the stage for the transition to MAGA.

2. I’d like to have been able to see Avengers: Endgame in theaters in that first weekend. I don’t recall what was going on, but I couldn’t make screenings any of those first three weeks. It vexes me to this day.

3. OK, I’m taking these not so much as reliving the exact moments but somehow recapturing their energy and their feeling, right? There was a night some years ago, when The Wife was still working nights at the restaurant she managed, and I was home by myself (The Kid was here but playing games and whatnot), and I started watching a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 on YouTube while I ate the pizza I had bought for dinner. I’ve known that piece for years, since I was first learning classical music in my teen years, but something about that symphony just clicked in my head and in my heart that night. That happens with art: you can know a work and be familiar with it and somehow your love of it, your appreciation of it…its grip on you…just goes to a next level at some point, and you don’t see it coming. (The performance was Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela at the BBC Proms. You can watch the performance here…unfortunately the HD versions are no longer on YouTube, so far as I know, which is a pity. The performance is raw and imperfect–the Bolivar Orchestra was originally a youth orchestra–but the music-making is utterly superlative. Sometimes the energy of a good youth orchestra outstrips that of a seasoned professional ensemble.)

4. Finally? It’s silly and weird, but the best things are silly and weird, right? I’d love to relive the first time The Wife hit me in the face with a pie. It’s strange how often the key moments in our lives are ones we really can’t explain very well, isn’t it?