Department Of Sober Memories
Dateline: Monday, November 3; 5 a.m.-ish; playing my morning wakeup/online games, one of which informs me [1] that it is National Sandwich Day.
Which assumes the question, What’s your favorite sandwich?
Sandwiches formed the bulk of my daily lunch items during my (pre-college) school years; however, moiself isn’t much of a sandwich eater these days. Thus, no name of a favorite sandwich pops into my mind. But I do have a favorite sandwich story.
Dateline: High school; my senior year, if memory serves. [2] Moiself is driving my friend MB and I back from the Long Beach Arena, where we ‘ve seen Led Zeppelin in concert. We arrive at her house, realize that we are both famished, and head for her kitchen. MB rustles up a loaf of bread, two plates, and various utensils while I empty the contents of her refrigerator onto her kitchen table. We proceed to construct sandwiches of…yeah…of things I would never consume in combination today. I cannot recall every ingredient we used, but the point was that we used almost every available ingredient. What sticks in my mind is three kinds of mustard, mayo, pickle relish, cottage cheese, raisins, peanut butter, olives, marmalade, some kind of roasted or peppers….. We called our creations – which we consumed with I-can’t-believe-we’re-eating-this?!?!? gusto – Led Zeppelin sandwiches.
And if any of these items had been available that evening
we would have put them between two slices of bread.
Moiself has never been a toker, not even in my younger days (nor, to my knowledge, was MB). So, although I was not a conscious (as in intentional) imbiber, unlike Bill Clinton I did inhale. It was either that or suffocate at most of the rock concerts of that era. And the “air” at Zeppelin concerts set the EPA record [3] for particulate matter (read: wafting weed fumes).
I can’t believe [4] that it took moiself *years* [5] to realize that the only logical explanation for post-Zeppelin concert sandwiches MB and I made and scarfed down with the last-meal desperation of death row prisoners was that we must have gotten a contact case of the munchies.
This was pretty much the scene at the Long beach Arena balcony seats. [6]
I can’t remember having been that hungry since the time I gave our cat Nova an enthusiastic, several minutes long head rub, forgetting that MH had previously applied a transdermal appetite stimulant gel to her ear. [7] Apparently, the medication works on all mammals – or at least cats *and* humans – as I discovered during the ensuing 24 hours when I emptied our kitchen cupboards and tried to eat everything in the house.
Yeah, blame the old sick kitty.
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Department Of Name Your 15 Minutes – Shame, Or Fame?
Last week, due to several current events prompts, moiself relistened to Monica Lewinski’s TED talk. The Price of Shame is one of the best TED talks, or public service presentations of any kind, I’ve ever heard. If you haven’t listened to it and/or you think you know what you think about Lewinsky, listen to her recount her unique situation (read: ordeal) of being one of the first cases of the internet being used as a forum for public shaming and cyber-bullying.
I relistened to her talk after reading about a recent public incident which brought to mind Andy Warhol’s [8] famous proclamation, that in the future “…everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”
Moiself thinks that not only are we’re heading for (if not already occupying) Warhol’s prediction, our present is morphing into a future where “…everyone will be shamed for 15 minutes.” The particular example I’m thinking of is the already infamous Milwaukee Brewers Karen incident at a baseball playoff game last month:
“A Milwaukee Brewers ‘Karen’ who went viral after threatening to call ICE on a rival Los Angeles Dodgers fan has reportedly been fired from her job.
The spectator, named online as Shannon Kobylarczyk, was seen in a racist rant towards Ricardo Fosado – a US citizen and war veteran – in footage that has been viewed more than a million times on X.
During Dodgers’ 5-1 win in the MLB playoffs…Fosado can initially be heard saying to the home fans around him in the stands: ‘Why’s everybody so quiet? What is this?’
His remark appeared to clearly irk the ‘Brewers Karen’, who fired back with a jibe about Donald Trump‘s immigration agents, saying: ‘Let’s call ICE.’
Fosado replied: ‘Call ICE! Call ICE! I’m a US citizen, war veteran baby girl. Two wars. ICE cannot do anything to me.’ At one stage of the video she seemingly tried to slap Fosado’s phone out of his hand while also calling him a ‘p***y’….
it took less than 24 hours for the woman in question to be fired by her employers….”
( excerpt, “Milwaukee Brewers ‘Karen’ fired from job after disgraceful racist rant towards war veteran at Dodgers game,” Daily Mail, 10-16-25 )
As repulsed as I was when I read about MB Karen’s bigoted bluster, I didn’t think she should necessarily lose her job due to her public display of drunken [9] asshattery. And apparently, neither did the target of her racist rave.
“An American citizen of Mexican descent who was on a business trip to Chicago when he decided to attend the game, Fosado said he thinks Kobylarczyk ‘made a mistake….
I feel bad for her…..We cannot be judged on one mistake and a lot of emotions were involved. It was just hurt feelings, nobody physically hurt anybody.’ ”
( excerpt, “MLB Fan Reportedly Loses Job For Terrible Remark During Playoff Game,”
yahoo sports, 10-16-25 )
Certainly, MB Karen earned her moment in the Shame Spotlight®. And she’s going to live with the consequences of her revelatory rant for at least the internet equivalent of 15 minutes (and it will be Google-able for much longer), until the internet shame/lynch mob moves the spotlight to yet another guano-for-brains loudmouth.
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Department Of Giving The Annoying Thing Another Chance…
That annoying thing would be a certain part of the podcast Ologies, 95% of which I genuinely enjoy and find informative…but it’s that 5% that frosts my butt. I’ve whined written about this before: the 5% annoyance involves one of The Reasons The Good Guys Lost The Election ® issues ( namely, the Left’s obsession with pronouns and labels, and with critiquing how someone says or asks something vs. focusing on the content of what someone is actually trying to say or ask).
Ologies podcast host Alie Ward, in her intro to each episode, talks about her guest using they/them pronouns. Okay; fine; whatever floats her (their?) boat…except that she records this intro *after* she’s already done the interview. And she begins each interview with the annoying-to-moiself part, where she asks her guests to introduce themselves by stating their names and pronouns. The majority of the time, when Ward’s guest is female, that guest says she uses she/her pronouns, and if the guest is male, he says he uses he/him pronouns. Thus, Ward already knows what pronouns her guest prefers. Yet, when Ward is in post-production for the episode, doing the intro, she refers to her guest using they/them pronouns.
Yep. She asks her guests to state their preferences, then later ignores their stated preferences, which I find incredibly patronizing and WTF-ing-point-is-there-in-asking?, face-palm-worthy.
A recent example of that was in the episode Critical Ponerology (WHAT IS “EVIL”?) with Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick.
Once I got over the irritation (Ward referred to the he/him -self-identified Dr. Ken as they), I was intrigued by the episode’s subject. What a topic for study – what is ‘evil’!? It is a word – a concept – that is exceedingly difficult to define, and perhapss even trickier to understand the history of the word, and who has been allowed to define it. And that sent me on a flashback…
…this once-upon-a-time was some 30 years ago. Pre-social media; pre-Twitter, X, Reddit, et al, for a period of about four or five weeks I used to check a certain message board. [10] Moiself had found this message board via a reference from MH about a colleague of his who’d made commentson the board, on a subject MH thought I might find interesting. After several weeks of checking the board twice a week (I suppose that qualified me as a lurker?), I was moved to make my first (which turned out to be my last) comments on it.
I posted said comments one day when the message board topic focused on what one of the posters termed the “evil” of natural disasters. This One Particular Poster® was getting all hot under his metaphorical collar, referring to a recent hurricane which had brought extensive wind and flooding damage to the southeastern seaboard of the USA. He did this – called the storm, *evil,* – several times, which brought out the Let’s all be clear about our terminology cop in moiself. I felt moved to offer that I found the use of the word evil, when applied to an explainable phenomenon of the natural world (e.g., earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes), problematic, as in, factually incorrect.
I gave my brief definition of evil as that which involves the motivations and intents of sentient beings. As devastating as the effects of, say, a tornado can be for humans, tornadoes have neither the agency nor the intent to deliberately and maliciously cause harm. The hurricane has no ill will toward the coastline residents who live in its path; it simply forms due to the particular physics of wind, ocean temperatures, currents, et al.
Before making the above fairly innocuous (IMO) comments, I had looked up records of other recent storms. I found several other major hurricanes and typhoons which had formed and then dissipated in open waters, either never making landfall or doing so on the shorelines of deserted islands, thus causing no damage to humans or human structures. I referenced those storms in my comments, and wondered if OPP would consider those storms *not* evil?
OPP’s response was a hurricane of vitriol, as he blew his hot air into me: “LADY, you don’t think that the hurricane was evil?!?!?!? Just ask the people whose homes got smashed, whose lives have been destroyed – LADY, *you* think the storm was not evil? Just ask the people who experienced….”
Yada yada yada. OPP kept on with his emphasis of how wrong LADY was. He had clearly misread or did not understand my point… Which other message board commentators quickly noted on my behalf.
Those others also noted OPP’s repeated use of the term LADY to address me, as if he were flinging a pejorative. And BTW, there was nothing my comments nor in my online posting name which would indicate my gender identification…which caused the other message board commentors to speculate if there was more than a wee bit o’ misogyny in OPP’s LADY assumption?
PP’s switched his LADY tempest tantrum to my defenders. Meanwhile, moiself lost interest in the silliness of it all. So much for my one foray into the online chatroom world.
One more thing, re the podcast’s subject matter of what is evil. Whatever you might hold the definition of evil to be, moiself thinks there are plenty of sufficient synonyms for that which is intentionally malicious and/or harmful. Evil is a word I’ll use hyperbolically or sarcastically but never seriously, as, IMO, evil, like sin, is one of the conceptual stones around humanities’ neck with which religious thought has burdened us.
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [11]
“Faith is the process of granting assent without proof, especially to supernatural claims. Faith is what you use to oppress, to justify, to judge in the name of (your) god – faith is the means to rationalize more evil in this world than anything in history. If there were a devil, faith would be his greatest invention.”
( attribution…unsure? )
* * *
May you remember that nothing in the natural world is inherently evil
May you have a favorite sandwich (or sandwich story);
May you never cross paths with anyone (including Jerry Lewis)
who would call you LADY;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] I don’t know why…but, why not?
[2] And it does, although sometimes the serve is an ace, and other times it’s a foot fault.
[3] In moiself’s not-so-scientific estimation.
[4] But I have to, since it’s true.
[5] Really. Like, two decades.
[6] Actually, it’s a still from the 1938 movie, Reefer Madness.
[7] Nova was experiencing loss of appetite and weight due to kidney disease, and was prescribed an appetite stimulant by her vet.
[8] Warhol, according to his Wikipedia bio, is “generally considered among the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century.” Well, certainly he was one of the most self-important, self-proclaimed artists, surpassed by none when it came to promoting himself.
[9] I’m assuming.
[10] Message board? Chat room? I can’t remember what it was called…I think MH alerted me to it, thinking I might find the discussions therein “interesting.”
[11] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
