Let's Make Mirth and Golumpki
let's laugh and eat in the spirit of Thanksgiving ahead!
Author Notes
Retreating to once-a-week posting is a great experiment! At least for me, it makes the whole process more fun. I coupled backing off with limiting my subscriptions a bit. While I still have a whole host of bookmarked, fun-to-read stuff, I limited myself to a small number of formal subscriptions so fewer interruptions! All of this is coupled with a small and steady increase in subscribers which kinda surprises me. I have a small group of dedicated commenters who I appreciate. I am focusing on doing the same for their Newsletters. It’s a bit like saying thank you for taking the time to comment which I appreciate! All of this is good and hopefully, a little less output from my corner of the internet is great for all of you.
A Returning Feature
On October 11th, I decided light-heartedness mixed with coffee was the formula for a fun post. The format Let’s Make Mirth and ?????? was a fun escape. We return today with Round #2. For the uninitiated, the “and” part today is Polish cabbage rolls. I make these on occasion as a paean to my Mom, may she RIP. The proper pronunciation if you don’t want to be scoffed at by the waitstaff is guh-LOOMP-key. If you are unfamiliar, it is your loss I am afraid.
Here is my first shot at today’s formula:
Growing Up Buffalo
When I was a kid, Buffalo was a two-newspaper town. The morning paper was the Buffalo Courier Express and the evening was the Buffalo Evening News. We subscribed to both. We also got a weekly local paper called The Cheektowaga Times. When the Courier Express went belly up the remaining paper shortened its name to The Buffalo News. Mom and Dad were newshounds while the three boys raced for the sports page.
The Bell “Toles” for Thee
Yeah, I know the spelling…but it will make sense soon enough. At some point, a local WNY kid named Tom Toles began doodling cartoons in the local newspaper. He worked for both local papers and eventually became the political cartoonist for the Washington Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and penned an awful lot of memorable and fun strips. He retired from the Post recently and I hope he is just “enjoying life”. He was syndicated in over 200 newspapers so I am sure all of you have seen his work in the past but may not as yet have made the association.
This bit of the post is about political cartooning. I am trying to not provide too many examples but leave that to you if you are inquisitive AND exploratory.
If you are a visual person (this is a tribute to why Newspapers are dying I fear), here is a great talk given by Toles. He’s a blast and not at all what I expected:
Since politics is a minefield, it is safer to stick with just funny. One of the strange and unfortunate trends is how easily folks are offended these days. Gary Larsen and The Far Side, consistent with its title never intended to be in the mainstream in the first place. Here are some wonderful Far Side cartoons of the past:
If my sense of humor was identical to all of you this Newsletter would be more popular. The Far Side was so prolific, that it is better to turn to the wisdom of the crowd. This story from Reddit gauges a top ten. They are great! For those of you that like controversy, I must send you on a treasure hunt. Here is a hint for what Larsen figures could have ended his career and probably would not have survived cancel culture. Search for “Far Side tethercat”. Please let me know in the comments what you think if you look up tethercat.
Twitter
From the previous paragraph, you can note that Mark is now dipping his toe into Reddit. Alas, after years of trying to work it out and have it bring some joy, I have taken a hiatus from Twitter. I expect I might be back at some point but so far after almost a month, I think I feel better. I am an optimist and hence hope that Twitter can improve under new management. This has little to do with how I might feel about Elon Musk. My sense is Twitter is broken and not good for the psyche. I never expect or hope to agree with someone 100% of the time. Musk’s track record is he is a very savvy businessman. I wish him good luck. Here is a cogent take on why it is worth trying to fix Twitter. My POV is consistent with my belief that black-and-white thinking is a fool’s errand. To me, the world, and most issues are gray. This post from Matt Yglesias was GREAT.
I have high hopes that the newish chat feature in Substack will be another way to socialize comments without using the major social media applications. It is currently only available for iOS but I am afraid that is our new world. After so many years of building its applications to run in iOS, Google has begun to behave like Apple and move toward a walled garden. As recently as last year 12/50 most popular applications in iOS were built by Google! Presumably, a lot of “privacy-conscious” folks appreciate knowing if there is an accident on the road a mile ahead. Apple continues to NOT make any of its applications operable outside of the walled garden. I understand that the new release of Google Home for the automation of lights, doors, cameras, and the like is not optimized for the iPad. It seems this may be the beginning of the breakdown.
For ten-plus years, there has been no access to Apple applications from the outside and it appears Google has begun to follow Apple’s lead. Things will get dicey as applications like Google Maps and Waze cease to operate well inside iOS. Let’s hope for a truce but I am not hopeful. With Apple taking a 30% cut of the revenue of applications Google builds for them, I suppose that Google will naturally begin charging similarly for the privilege of use. It sounds expensive and inconvenient to me. Hope for the world as you wish it could be but accept the world as it is. Just for fun, I have been playing around with Bing and IOS Spotlight (Apple’s first stab at a search engine). I hear folks all the time take jabs at Google Search. It is not clear to me why after doing searches. As a direction-challenged individual, I would imagine there are a lot of iPhone and Apple CarPlay users who appreciate Google Maps and Waze for getting around. Let’s hope that Apple can protect its customers’ interests and commit to building for all instead of the few. Some of us familiar with both ecosystems know what we are missing. I would love to just be able to download iMessage and I imagine if Google Maps and Waze go behind a wall, Apple users will feel the same. I guess we are coming to the end of an era where one builds for the other and the other never reciprocates.
The Most Important of the Alliums
As a plant-based eater, I know that eating allium family plants is a pretty good choice. It is also an end-run to talking about my favorite source of satire, “The Onion”. The Onion is NOT for the faint of heart. What makes it great is that in the tradition of MAD Magazine, it is an equal-opportunity skewer of all things. In the spirit of something for everyone, I refuse to make this decision for you. Be WARNED that if you pick one of these, you may be shocked. That is the price of entry for strong satire. If you are not up for it, just stream an episode of Cheers or The Office. The humor can be as sharp as the titles imply. There is topical material of all sorts on the issues of the day. Some are more shocking than I am comfortable sharing in Substack.
Pot Pourri
For steady readers of my Newsletter, my topics jump around. I GENUINELY BELIEVE there is something to learn from EVERYTHING. Being inquisitive, AND exploratory is a great way to be. What is the difference? I think we can all get lots of confirmatory garbage about what we already think we believe. You can acquire that without being intentional in our modern world and you still may be inquisitive. Being exploratory requires a different approach. I have grown to appreciate the QUALITY of great writing. A well-written book on a given topic can leave you sure you have something figured out. However, if you keep exploring and get more than one point of view, it will change you. I recently left Twitter. If there was a singular reason it was the “quote tweet”. I think the quote tweet captures the ability to shout yeah but without thinking. It is poisonous and takes perfectly “normal” human beings and redirects them into a mob. So when I say read from another point of view, I am talking long-form and not 140 characters.
Persistence Has Its Reward
Today is light-hearted and I believe I’ve saved the best for last. This is a curated list of great infomercial products. It will be very hard to stop laughing at the bear. Too much.
Today’s Recipe
When I need a bit of nostalgia and comfort food, it is hard to top cabbage rolls. All cultures have their dumplings and variations on the meat roll. For me, thanks to a Mom with Polish-American roots, the golumpki will always be one of my favorite things. For a change, I won’t be preachy about what I eat these days. These wonders are simple peasant food and stand up well to substitutions so I will leave it up to you to figure it out. If any of you are interested in how to make them, send me an email and I will gladly share them at mrkjmsdln@gmail.com. Since I set my inbox up with lots of spam filtering, send the message with Golumpki in the SUBJECT and it will make it through to my inbox.
The Poll & Music
Today’s recipe reminds me of how universal some foods are across cultures. While tonight I talked about Golumpki, I could just have easily waxed poetic on the pierogi. Speaking of pierogies today’s poll is fun. I have concluded that nearly every culture makes a dough pocket of some sort. What is your favorite? If not on the list, share in the comments, and if intrepid share a good recipe.
Tonight was a change of pace. Sometimes not being so serious is a good thing. Here’s a song that reminds us not to be so serious all the time.
What’s Next
Writing about (and making) my Mom’s Golumpki has me thinking about food. When we return we will talk about “Taste” in all its forms. As always the link will not be live until it is published next week. See you then.
Hey happy to hear your readership is growing!
And so tickled to see a shoutout to the Cheektowaga Times! That was my first reporter job. I wrote the news, took photos, laid out the paper, took out the garbage and sometimes delivered the paper to the stores when the usual guy was in vacation.
I voted for the something else and that something is the golumpki of course. They look delicious! Or do they not count as dumplings?
Have you checked out Above The Fold on Substack? All things dumplings.