Tag: Ice Cream

  • ODDS and ENDS: UNION!, American Folklore, and Ice Cream

    (Casey Jones you better watch your speed!)

    Oh, shit! The actors joined the strike! Yup, SAG-AFTRA is on the picket line with the WGA, and now no one gets pretty new movies and shows this Fall! I hope you’re happy Studios! Both sides will make their case over the next few weeks, seeing who can build up the bigger public support, and then the real negotiations will begin. The truth of the matter is that the delivery of entertainment has changed. The traditional way for studios to earn income (movie theatres, cable, and ad tv) has declined and streaming hasn’t closed the gap, though that’s how everyone wants to get their entertainment. But I will also point out there are only five media corporations in the US, and it’s been that way for a very long time, so if they aren’t making money, that’s on them. It’s not like there is a ton competition out in the market. Media is an oligopoly so they are in control for how it all works. The studios could solve this tomorrow; stop paying your C-Suite hundreds of millions of dollars. Sorry, but CEO’s can only have two mansions, one Learjet, and one yacht from here on out. We all will have to make sacrifices to survive.

    And when was the last time you thought about American Folklore? Like, Casey Jones, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry. They don’t teach that stuff in school anymore. I asked my daughter about it, and she has no idea what I was talking about. I can’t prove this, but I have this weird feeling that schools were teaching American Folklore as a form of propaganda, to get us kids to believe that there was a mythology to American development and enguiniety, instead of teaching us that our past was a whole lot more about exploitation and exclusion. I can’t prove it, but these people who pushed the Folklore might have been the same people that killed teaching us kids the metric system.

    Ice cream really is the best. Doesn’t matter the season, ice cream is perfect.

  • Hot in the City

    It was warm yesterday, but today it’s going to be hot in NYC. Like Summer hot. Early July hot. And we don’t have our A/C’s.

    Like reasonable people, who keep fooling themselves into thinking that the weather patterns of the past will continue into the future, we took all of our air conditioners out of our apartment at the end of September. You know, at the beginning of Fall, when everything starts to cool down. Normally, we don’t go and get the A/C’s out of storage until late May, and even sometimes into June. We should have just kept them in the widows, and suffered through our amazingly mild winter.

    Currently, we are in a three-day heatwave. Technically you can only call it a heat wave if the temp is above 90 degrees for three days in a row. But being that it was 85 yesterday, t will be 90 today, and then 88 on Friday, I think it is fair to say that it’s a heat wave. I mean, on Sunday the high was 55. I had a sweater on for god sakes. I was drinking coffee to stay warm at an Easter Egg Hunt with my kid.

    Now, I’m sitting by my window, in shorts and a shirt, praying that a breeze will come through, but it won’t because the new construction behind our building is killing the cross wind, and I think we are all going to die tonight.

    The only winner here is the kid because she’s going to get ice cream, pretty much all day, because nothing is better than ice cream on a hot day.

  • What Solves All the Problems?

    The kid was mad as hell at me yesterday. The reason for her anger was that I wouldn’t allow her to take a toy to school. She had been told over the weekend that she couldn’t do it, but when Monday morning rolled around, she tried again, only to get the same result from her parents; no.

    And she was so angry. She wouldn’t hold my hand crossing the street and she wouldn’t talk to me as we walked to school. I know she wanted to say something to me, to make me feel bad, but I want to say that she knew if she said something mean, it would only make the situation worse.

    I could be wrong.

    When I picked her up from school, she was a little happy to see me. She smiled when she saw me walking up, and then, as if she reminded herself that she was mad at me, she dropped her smile and gave a very dramatic frown. I asked how her day was, and she said it was just okay, that nothing happened. I took her to the local playground so she could run around for a bit, and maybe being with her friends would put her in a better mood. Not so much.

    When we got home she disappeared in her room, and when she emerged for dinner, she seemed a still had the frown. She was clearly hungry as she cleaned her plate, and in our house, a clean plate means you get a little treat. We had bought ice cream over the weekend due to the heatwave, so it seem appropriate that she could have a little ice cream.

    And that was the magic that broke the spell. A little cookies and cream retuned our silly talkative kid to us. Yes, again, ice cream comes to the rescue and solves all the problems. It really does when it comes to kids. I am sure that there is something to be said that you shouldn’t teach kids to equate happiness with food, or something like that, but damn, ice cream always seems to work when you want to put someone in a better mood. I know it works for me. If life sucks, just eat some ice cream.

    There is no deep message here, or a revolutionary revelation. Just… eat more ice cream.

    (Say, don’t forget to like this post, or share it, or leave a comment. I got bills to pay, you know.)

  • Coronavirus: Observations in NYC

    I know that earlier today the WHO officially called coronavirus a pandemic, and again, not too surprised nor too worried about it. I am following all the suggestions, and I am washing my hands, keeping sanitizer on me, and trying to limit my exposure to large groups. Also, I am trying to eat healthy, exercise, and get a good night’s sleep as well. Trying to be healthy all around.

    I did have to run some errands today in the City, and I was limited to Harlem and the Upper West Side, but this is what I observed:

    The number of people on the streets in Harlem seemed normal, such as, not smaller than would be expected for the time of day I was out.

    On the subway, I did see people in masks. Now, people have always tried to put as much space between them and others when riding, so again, people looked to be behaving normally.

    I was around the Lincoln Center area, and people looked normal going about their business.

    I stopped off at a Trader Joe’s, and the store was out of toilet paper, paper towels, and ice cream. The ice cream I get; you’re stuck in doors watching, or catching up, on your shows. Binge watching leads to binge eating. I get it. The paper towels and toilet paper thing still blows my mind, as in why hoard that? I first read about these shortages in Seattle on BuzzFeed, and I thought how odd. I had no idea that a run on toilet paper could be the carney in the coal mine for coronavirus.

    Other than that, all seems normal in NYC.