I forget the circumstances, but I was. We didn’t have television all the time when I was a child, but there was a period when I was three or four when I remember a little black and white television . . . probably about thirteen inches, respectable enough, I suppose, for the period at hand. Among the shows that I recall watching was Bonanza. I didn’t “get” Bonanza. I understood that the people I was looking at on the screen were cowboys, and that there were Indians, and people in some sort of town, but the idea of a romanticized period of American history–at the time only seventy years past! can you believe it? now look at us–where such goings on might have occurred did not operate in my brain.

“Is Little Joe all right?” I asked my mother, as someone got the drop on Little Joe in some canyon before he could get his guns clear of his holsters. She assured me he was, but I remained concerned until his father and brother came to rescue him. (This begins to concern me again as I wonder how Sparrow will process television.) I also got confused, because not only was there Bonanza, but Gunsmoke as well. (I can’t fathom a world where so many cowboy shows infested the airwaves . . . almost like I can’t fathom how any crime investigation shows can infest the airwaves now.) I confess that I confused the two, and the confusion remains to this day: I know things that “happened” on the Ponderosa Ranch, and I knew things that “happened” involving Marshal Dillon, but I didn’t totally understand these were two different fictional worlds. Then there was the whole Beverly Hillbillies business. How did they fit in to all of this, and why did they never seem to meet the Cartwrights in Virginia City?

By the time that I was able to properly get this lined up in my head (don’t even get me started on the Western episode in Star Trek) we didn’t have TV anymore, and such questions passed out of my head. I was a lot older before we had television, briefly, again, and didn’t become a regular devotee until college, where I could weatch all the Gunsmoke reruns on Saturday afternoon KSHB that I wanted.

A man may die, a forest may burn, the last speaker of an old language may slip softly away and something precious passes away forever, but the circus never closes, the clowns never desist from the greasepaint antics, and high above the ballerinas of the air leap from wire to wire and trapeze to trapeze. Roar the lions! Spring the tigers! Crack the whip!

The circus tickets must be bought, the concert tickets must be sold. Need a pop tart to choke down the grief? Britney Spears tickets have come to town. Truly there is nothing so painful that merriment will not heal.

After the Black Death in Europe, a curious new image appeared in the churches and on the graves. Perhaps stemming from Boccacio’s Decameron, a gruesome skeletal Death came to lead pope, king, bishop, knight, burgher, and peasant all away to the grave. Repeated in stone and paint, the Death was grimly realistic, and sometimes his victims carried the black boils of the plague. It was called the Danse Macabre, which you may remember from the final shots of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. It was a grim kind of chuckling hysteria, a running black joke in a world gone mad with catastrophe.

Now we have no such qualms. It is the future, after all, not some silly old times! We’re past that, and it’s the modern age of light and joy. Tickets are easy to search for on the internet, easy to buy, and cheap, cheap, cheap! Theatre to your taste? Or would you prefer to take the show in between gambling sprees in Las Vegas? A smooth and easy to use interface, and a one hundred percent buyer guarantee. Sporting events, local events ticketed and emailed directly to you–nothing so grim in this world that the show, that always goes on, that will never, never stop, cannot soothe.

House on Vicodin, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

It is Tuesday, so that means House. This is Bonnie’s House doll, with a secret compartment so he can hide his Vicodin therein.

Next year House will be on another night: Monday, I think. I wonder if he and Cutty will ever get together? Angela and Tony did, and look at what happened to Who’s the Boss.

cla-am ho-o-oo!, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

The quahog clam . . . one of my favorite clams of all time. Other than the ones in clam chowder.

They have oysters at Cosentino’s, but no clams. Is there an oyster chowder?

Why, yes there is . . .

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients:

4 slices bacon, coarsely chopped
1 small sweet onion, finely diced
1 rib celery, thinly sliced
1 small carrot, peeled and finely diced
1/2 red bell pepper, seeded and finely diced
2 cloves garlic, pressed
3 cups heavy cream
1 cup dry white wine
Salt and fresh-ground black pepper, to taste
36 small shucked fresh oysters with their liquor (24 fluid ounces or 2 cups liquor - see Note)
2 Tablespoons fine-chopped fresh flat-leaf (Italian) parsley
2 teaspoons fine-chopped chives
Preparation:

Saute bacon 2 to 3 minutes in a heavy stockpot over medium heat. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Set aside.

Add onions, celery, carrots, and bell peppers to the bacon grease. Lower heat and saute until vegetables are tender, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes. Add garlic and saute 1 additional minute, stirring often.

Add cream, white wine, salt, and pepper. Increase heat to medium and cook until small bubbles begin to rise around the edges. Reduce heat to low and add oysters with their liquor and the cooked bacon. Gently simmer 1 to 2 minutes until oysters are slightly firm. Do not boil or overcook. Stir in chives and serve hot with oyster crackers or warm crusty bread.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Note: If you do not end up with enough oyster liquor, add enough bottled clam juice to make up the difference.

It was a tragic but not unexpected blow when Recycled Sounds closed over two years ago. All, I think, of Westport’s other great vinyl/cd/cassette/eight track/zine shops have folded one after the other through the early to mid 2000s. The Napster revolution’s unintended side effect was the annihilation of physical musical media. The Empire Records* world is dead, and, presumably, will remain that way, along (mostly) with zines.

So it is a surprise, but not a surprise, to find Facebook friend and former Recycled Sounds owner Anne Winter is selling her entire personal record collection. Over 4000 LPs, hundreds of forty-fives, and some silk screen posters, the good old kind,  will be for sale from 10-5 Saturday, December 27th, at the Record bar, 1020 Westport Road. (Cash, Mastercard, Visa only.) Lord knows why, and lord knows what is in it. The days they change, don’t they?
____________

*A great but much neglected/maligned movie.

Breast enhancement does not always get a good rap in popular culture–even if it is popular culture, much of the time.  How many pop tartlets runnng about, already superficially beautiful, aim for that extra something on top to make them stand out — or not — in the crowd of blond butterflies?

However, this is a real medical procedure, which can have important results. Situations where enhancement can be useful include after pregnancy, when the natural tissues have weakened, or after weight loss, when the body is less supportive: physical discomfort in some circumstances can be serious and this is a legitimate avenue of treatment. There are sometimes psychological and esteem issues at stake also, and a modest enhancement can outweigh many years of unhappiness and the heavy costs of therapy. Fortunately, modern enhancement surgery is safe, and recovery times are brief, just week, when handled by practiced professionals who have conducted hundred of procedures, such as the physicians at MYA.

The only thing one must do is consult carefully on one’s motives for the surgery, and to not become addicted, as some people to, to endless physical tweaks of one’s person. The tabloid news is full of celebrities who went too far, and one does not want to emulate them.

And here’s the explanation:

NBC is expected to announce Tuesday that it has signed its late-night star Jay Leno to a new contract that will keep him at the network in a new format that will give him the 10 p.m. time period each weeknight for a show similar to the one he has done on NBC’s “Tonight Show” show since 1993. . . . No broadcast network has ever before offered the same show in prime time five nights a week. Such so-called “stripped shows” have been a staple of daytime broadcasting.

The offer of a new weeknight show for Mr. Leno at 10 p.m., an idea that NBC executives said Monday came from the NBC chief executive, Jeff Zucker, not only allows NBC to retain Mr. Leno’s services, but also means the network may be able to greatly reduce costs of developing and producing other prime-time shows.

There’s your five hours less a week. For us in the Central time zone, that means no more 9pm NBC programming that’s not Leno.

Hm! Not that I stay up till nine anmore anyway . . .

I’ve never been a pool player. Friends of mine learned in their parents’ basements, honed their skills at Harling’s in Westport, and became adequate, not stellar, performers on the table at Dave’s Stagecoach. Being relatively unskilled at hand-eye coordinated, I made a clumsy mess of the green battlefield, sinking the wrong balls, or in the wrong order, or missing them altogether. I’d struggle and strain, my wretched cue English limping in one direction while my body English heaved longingly in another. The balls would scuttle amongst each other sullenly like a cluster of turtles in a long, the one I wanted to strike dangerously lurking behind the eight ball, itself trembling at the mouth of a cup.

I’d snarl and mutter, but the bright little things would sit there mocking me in front of the entire bar. People who knew better would chuckle.
So onward, ever onward.

I’ve never been a gamer. Friends of mine love to go to the boats, cranking the arms of the machines for all they are worth, wheels spinning, pasteboards fluttering down, turned over, gypsified old European royalty winking up at me from velvet tables. I don’t see the fascination. I want my money in my wallet. The only time I was convinced to go up there I converted a few bills into pennies and slowly wasted them away. I was unamused. The sweating, smoking, desperate folk crouching over every device, the sense-inflamed lights and noises, simply made me ill. It felt like one giant Bad Idea. Besides, the boats are all they way up by the river, as they should be (if not quite in it,) and we know I don’t like going anywhere, for any reason, at any time, or doing any thing.

Like spending money online. Now mix spending money online, and taking risks, and fiddling around with games at which I am ill-informed, and you have the bright blue links that you discover at the bottom of every struggling forum on the internet trying to keep the lights on. If they aren’t linking you to insurance or medicine or pyramid schemes, they kindly suggest you visit little affairs such as online casino games. Unfortunately here I must draw the line, and say, I bow out. Stumbling upon this veritable Cottage of Lost Play, which, though a “news” site, I suspect is of tenuous legality for Americans, as I did from the bottom of some comix bulletin board or another, I had to frown at such offhand remarks as,

Have you heard of Casino Tropez? No?! I was recently not. But nothing, it is a fair and good Playtech casino, which is also yet to be heard in IOG.

A neutral reviewer of such a domain would have to nod solemnly and move along from there. Wacky Germans! I’d further suggest that hiring someone with a tighter grasp of the English language would be an excellent investment. As it is, the news they promise is difficult to understand, particularly for one who doesn’t know much about these things to begin with. I confess I read the page three times over and don’t understand yet. Call me a newbie.
Imagine three things. First, imagine me sweating, five beers down, in the dark of the Stagecoach hoping that this time I’ll drop the five ball. Hard, eh? Now imagine me, frantically bored and jealous of my pennies at the Argosy. Impossible, eh? Lastly, imagine me staring at a computer screen, willing with every syllable of body English at my command for some server in Germany or Russia to, Schrodinger’s Cat-wise, flip a bit up instead of down, and let loose a cascade of euros and rubles, electronic and glittering, fall into my open hands. Imagine the inconceivable!

Not for me. Maybe for someone else.

Quick! I’m a slick Hollywood celebrity with one too many drinks under my belt. Or a jet-setting socialite staggering out of the club, and no one took my keys. I’m going to make it to the cover of OK! magazine, and I could use the publicity, but how am I going to get off that criminal docket for my DUI?

Simple: I’m going to look up Los Angeles DUI Defense Attorneys | California Drunk Driving Lawyers for help. After all — I’m too beautiful for jail! Aren’t I?

50 years’ combined experience may say yes!

Or you may be a regular joe unfairly stopped, with an improperly working breathalyzer machine, with improper procedures. Your chances at a fair trial will be greatly improved with a competent and experienced defense team.

Here’s a cute little thing I’ve not seen before–birthday cards and other fun things at smilebox. I opened up this site and found a happy box with a crank and a bit of merry music. You can make free online cards (there’s hundreds of designs, scrap books, slide shows, and more. You just add your photos — it can work directly from iPhoto, or from your PC, — and your music (even video) and you can email or blog them for free. Got a facebook or myspace? You can make slide shows for it.

If it’s not enough to have them online, you can print them out as well with the premium version. If you’re the kind who cranks out a lot of cards, a monthly membership to Club Smilebox might be in order. I know for a fact that a greeting card costs at least $2.29 these days, so three cards a month and you never have to go to the drug store for a card again,and every one you get will be personalized from you, for the recipient.

I know at least one person who likes to send e-cars all the time from a Big Card Place’s site, and this would be a whole new avenue of designs for them. You should try it out at least once.