Any boomer music stream, like Spotify, will eventually roll around to play Jackson Browne’s “These days”, a song he wrote at age 16 and made a hit in 1973 from his second album, For Everyman. Greg Allman had a big hand in the song’s arrangements.
Across the decades, it still weighs on the shoulders of retiring boomers like me. How true it was after retirement “I’ve been out walking, I don’t do that much talking, these days”. Then to the end comes the dagger to the heart: “Don’t confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them”. Unfortunately for JB’s version, he fades out with some heavy rock rifts, not letting this sentiment rest. Tom Rush’s much gentler treatment is my preference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TjqOqy4MpM
So this song is as hard to avoid as something by Bob Seger. When it comes on I always retreat to that contemplative state. Even though I’ve finally escaped from the morose grip of this tune, “please don’t confront me with my failures” always stabs me to the heart. Thank you, Jackson, for always keeping me in touch with my feelings and remembering what is real.
‘Tis a sad time when the few remaining pommes from that peck of Northern spies you bought at the farmers’ market now rot in your fruit bowl. The daily apple to keep the doctor away never materialized, and a few great desserts used up most of ‘em. But there is one last mission to which a spy apple might apply itself: glühwein, the magnificent spiced wine our German friends offer every Christmas, at Christkindlmarkt, if you’re so blessed to have one near you. Even our beloved Chicago market has gone virtual this year, so we’re on our own to capture the charms of the experience. While we can’t recapture the charms of the markets, we have one weapon in our disposal: access to a well stocked spice rack and to a proper German red wine (usually a vanishingly small segment of your wine store’s stocks) and you too can dribble out that wonderful concoction. Works best in a crock pot, but a pot on a low stove would work. You’ll need a big navel orange you can zest and then section, and a lemon, plus that apple, but all else is smallball.
Here’s the recipe we’ve devised. This is a serious glühwein recipe. Look up all others and you will see gaps.
kathy and bob’s glühwein
2 X 750 mL bottles German red wine ginger root, 1”X1”, sliced thin
allspice, 9 berries place spices in cloth mesh bag (e.g
star anise, 4 pods cheesecloth)
bay leaf, 1 place spice bag, fruits, wine & honey
cardamon pods, 2 T into crock pot
dried red chilis, 4 cook on high X 60’, then reduce to
cinnamon sticks, 8 low
whole cloves, 12 ladle into appropriate cups, including
coriander, ½ t fruit. serve warm
fenegreek ½ t
fennel seeds, 1 t
find an appropriate German red wine to make it with
Here’s a list of possibilities:
Dornfelder
Pinot Noir
Trollinger
Regent
Valpolicella
Barbolino
Lemberger
Merlot
Montepulciano
Zweigelt
We’ve discovered a Michigan wine that works very well: Left Foot Charley’s Blaufränkisch. We like supporting Michigan business as we sip away. We have one remaining spy, so another crock pot of glühwein seems in the offing. Hate to let those apples go to waste.
It’s in a different culture, but one close to ours (we’re both at least 25% Norwegian) sköl!
It’s remarkable how fast things can happen on a whim. I get a regular nudge on my e-mail from BestClassicBands.com. Always entertaining stuff immersing me in the music of my boomer past. A recent offering of forgotten hits of the British Invasion included a hit by one young Jonathon King “Everyone’s gone to the moon” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ks2TPPyho. A melodic but melancholy offering, it was included in the songs carried on Apollo 11. So it made it to the moon. I never knew he was a dead ringer for the high-school version of me.
Mr King was wildly successful in pop music, writing “Hooked on a feeling” but spent a few years in the slammer for some time he spent with adolescent boys. Too bad.
But back to the whim, came on today a clip of Eric Clapton with Derek and the Dominos in Johnny Cash’s TV show in 1970. https://bestclassicbands.com/derek-dominos-johnny-cash-6-18-16666/. After Eric got off a soulful “She’s gone”, Johnny joins Eric and brings on Carl Perkins himself – bad toupée and all – to front the trio. Wow, just wow. Then as an aside, BestClassicBands mentions Eric’s 2021 tour, postponed from 2020. Eric is one of those boomer rockers always alluding to his “last tour”, but he’s an ernst mensch, so maybe he means it. An eager click finds no dates planned near Detroit. In fact, the “tour” seems to be almost entirely in London, with 5 nights at the Royal Albert Hall (“how many holes it takes to fill?”), and dates in Prague and Amsterdam. Maybe more are forthcoming. But Kathy and I couldn’t wait. We scored VIP tickets, not far from the stage, for May 15th. Don’t ask. Kathy will have wrapped up her teaching, maybe for good, and will deserve a little excursion. From there, Mr. trip planner sprung into action. We have an AirBnB in Kensington SW7, short walk to Royal Albert Hall and smack in the neighborhood where I whiled away 2 months of medical school in the winter of ’79 at the Brompton Hospital nearby and St. George’s Hospital, then at Hyde Park Corner, priciest piece of real estate in London and now site of a luxury hotel (the medical school is in now in Tooting SW 17, one district away from Wimbledon). Last touch was airline tickets, for which Capital One was happy to discharge all my accumulated points to offset the there and back.
Of course, this is another COVID gamble. Gotta figure things will be a little better by then. I know for sure that Eric will want to go forth. They used to write “Clapton is God” on the walls of his London performance venues. If he has any of those powers remaining, I’ll know he’ll be pulling for us to be sitting in section M of Royal Albert Hall on May 15th to hear him play. “Lay down Sally”
That’s what I’ve been doing this 10th day of Christmas, feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. There’s the printed pages from Food and Wine that have to get into their sleeves in my ring binders and all those 3X 5 cards I’ve made of new and less legible recipes I’ve had to file. Quite a few of the former, as we’re into a pretty creative stretch. But the dive into the old recipe boxes is quite the dip into the old days. There are recipes in the hand of mothers, aunts, grandparents and older sibs calling to us from the past about how to do things. As I try to create new recipe cards from their scribblings, I strive to keep their same folded up papers for the memories. Kathy’s mom will forever tell us how to make her ice cream pumpkin pie and me my Aunt Dorie’s stew. Tonight I’m going for braised lamb necks with garlic and fennel. Nothing I think my predecessors would have cooked up, but something I think we’re savoring. Praise all that has come before. Bon appetit.
No doubt when the ball drops tonight in Times square, not a soul will shed a tear for the passing of 2020. The appropriate vitriol this tumultuous year has engendered is only poorly represented by a logo someone has come up of it.
Dare I confess then, that 2020 has been a pretty good year for me and Kathy? I really don’t remember much about those first two COVID free months, except that’s when I started my blog. It was the start of my first full year being retired, and I started to get into a groove, writing, cooking, exercising, and spending time with my missus. As the year continued, and virtual teaching became the norm, having Kathy home all the time became the usual. As our betters figured out what to do with us to protect us from COVID, home was a constant. It became an excuse for cooking; we’ve not had a meal cooked for us by anyone else except for food carts, bar food and travel since February. Daily hikes have become a routine, and I’ve compiled 2 ring binders of trails in the area. The exercise has kept our waistlines down and moods up. We’ve travelled, including a weekend in Chicago just before the meltdown, a foray to Colorado to attend a friend’s memorial service in June, and another trip to Colorado, extended to California, in August. Except for the damned masks and no food or booze on the airplane, travel in the age of COVID wasn’t so bad. Things are less crowded and the fraidy cat COVID averse have stayed home so can’t come down with accusing glares about “unsafe” behavior”.
Yes it’s been sad to miss out on contact with friends and family. But Zoom has allowed us to see their faces and hear their voices. Maybe some of the contacts wouldn’t even have happened were it not for Zoom. At home, we’re blessed with neighbors that know how to throw a party with appropriate social distancing, mostly.
We miss sports. We’re pleased that perhaps not too many people got to see the football Wolverines’ disastrous season. Kathy’s former student, Andrew Vastardis, was starting center, so she was sad not to be able to see him play. But now it’s hoops season, and Juwan’s boys are off to a sizzling start. Kathy claimed another starting center, 5th year senior Austin Davis. He’s out with an ankle injury, and was just holding a place for the big freshman Dickenson, but is a great kid. TAing for Kathy for course credit this term.
Throughout this ordeal, it helps that Kathy and I still like each other. A lot. We slide into next year, facing a lobster tail, shrimp and gravlax New Year’s eve snack, washed down by glühwein, with high hopes for a better 2021. No damned vaccinations!
Buried in my old blogs is a post where I wax on about my career in Rheumatology https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/470. Even though I haven’t seen a patient for over 2 years, I still write for and publish in the medical literature about the things that held my passion. Way back in May I submitted my 4,066 words on “Arthroscopy in Rheumatology: Where have we been? Where might we go?” to Rheumatology (Oxford). Yes, that Oxford. My mentor Bill Arnold and good friend and number one ‘scopy buddy Ken Kalunian joined me as co-authors. To our surprise and delight, it was accepted July 31st after a few revisions. On December 1st, I received notice from Oxford University Press that it had at last been published, not between the covers of a journal yet, but electronically accessible. My copyright agreement with Oxford restricts how freely I can share the article, but I am allowed to post it on my website. So here it is. Worth at least a scan and the figures are pretty, I think.
Merry Christmas to all my friends and whomever happens to stumble on this site! It’s morning as I write this. No presents yet, not even breakfast. Kathy and I sit by the fire, excerpts from the Messiah playing, sipping our orange-juice free mimosas. The nature of the crisis at hand hit me early. Kathy and I have a shoe box full of our favorite Christmas CDs, which lives in the storage room till this wonderful time of year. Between Spotify, WRCJ and WFMT, most of our Christmas music needs have been met by our iTouch. We decided this morning to pull and play our favorites. We’d played a few here and there, but there were a lot we haven’t heard for a year. The pile got pretty big pretty fast and we realized there weren’t going to be enough hours in this day to play even a fraction of them, no matter how late we stayed up. What to do? The thought came, aren’t there 12 days of Christmas? Sure we all know the silly song with the French hens, turtle doves, five gold rings and all, but what about those 12 days? For most of us Americans, it’s back to work on the 26th and that’s that. Maybe a little bargain shopping and some lousy football with a hiccup for New Year’s, plus still a slowdown at the office, but the post-Christmas hangover wastes no time in arriving. Those of us church goers hear our pastors refer to the Sunday after New Year’s as “Epiphany”, but I’m not sure we emerge knowing what “an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure” we’d just experienced. But if we understand Epiphany, we might begin to understand the bookends of what was once a week and a half of festivities, not just the climax of Christmas we’ve come to accept. Epiphany marks the day the baby Jesus was visited by the Magi (the 3 Wise Men). Not that long ago, each day between Christmas and Epiphany was marked by a feast honoring a saint. Here it is explained (from https://www.whychristmas.com/customs/12daysofchristmas.shtml)
Day 2 (26th December also known as Boxing Day): St Stephen’s Day. He was the first Christian martyr (someone who dies for their faith). It’s also the day when the Christmas Carol ‘Good King Wenceslas‘ takes place.
Day 3 (27th December): St John the Apostle (One of Jesus’s Disciples and friends)
Day 5 (29th December): St Thomas Becket. He was Archbishop of Canterbury in the 12th century and was murdered on 29th December 1170 for challenging the King’s authority over the Church.
Day 6 (30th December): St Egwin of Worcester.
Day 7 (31st December): New Year’s Eve (known as Hogmanay in Scotland). Pope Sylvester I is traditionally celebrated on this day. He was one of the earliest popes (in the 4th Century). In many central and eastern European countries (including Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland and Slovenia) New Year’s Eve is still sometimes called ‘Silvester’. In the UK, New Year’s Eve was a traditional day for ‘games’ and sporting competitions. Archery was a very popular sport and during the middle ages it was the law that it had to be practised by all men between ages 17-60 on Sunday after Church! This was so the King had lots of very good archers ready in case he need to go to war!
Day 9 (2nd January): St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen, two important 4th century Christians.
Day 10 (3rd January): Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. This remembers when Jesus was officially ‘named’ in the Jewish Temple. It’s celebrated by different churches on a wide number of different dates!
Day 11 (4th January): St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American saint, who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the past it also celebrated the feast of Saint Simon Stylites (who lives on a small platform on the top of a pillar for 37 years!).
Day 12 (5th January also known as Epiphany Eve): St. John Neumann who was the first Bishop in American. He lived in the 19th century.
The eve of day 12 – Twelfth Night – is still a big deal in England. One big party. Poor and rich often change roles. Shakespeare titled a play about it. Practically speaking, it’s traditional to take your Christmas decorations down after 12th night. We leave ours up to Imbolc (Feb 2nd, a.k.a, Groundhog day https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/163).
Some say early Christians appropriated this time of year to celebrate the birth of our Savior in order to co-opt the Pagans, who had a dandy celebration going at the time of the winter solstice called Yule (https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/paganism/holydays/year.shtml). I don’t know how long the Pagans went at it after Yule, but the Christians sure knew how to keep the party going! Falling away from the church means some spiritual losses to be sure, but look what else you’re missing! Kathy and I are looking forward to celebrating the next 12 days to the fullest, including playing all that Christmas music!
If somebody near you does that, should you be concerned? Sure, sick people expel the virus that’s making them sick through body fluids forcibly propelled outward. You can see a graphic demonstration of that phenomenon here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mnC43QRsuM
I think most of us saw the brief video of one extreme response to something like this back at the beginning of the pandemic. But it’s worth seeing again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LawuQG8Z81w
But isn’t it the stealth asymptomatic carrier the one about which we’re all worried? Isn’t that what the masks are protecting us from, both ways (let’s not get into the chain link fence/mosquito deal; just remember the pores in that blue mask of yours are way bigger than the 100 nanometer virus). Might there be lessons to be learned from somewhere else? For example, do we still respect what comes out of China? They gave us this virus. They were also the first to handle the outbreak, and figured out quite a few things which we then followed https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/337. So might they still be able to teach us something about it? A week before Thanksgiving, out of Wuhan, this time from Department of Social Medicine and Health Management, School of Public Health, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China (not the virology lab), came a study published in Nature Communication, one of premier journal Nature’s many versions, this dedicated to rapid communication of scientific findings. In the study – “Post-lockdown SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening in nearly ten million residents of Wuhan, China” – they went out to survey everyone in Wuhan, with a population of more than 11 million people, more than our whole state of Michigan. They started about 6 weeks after the lockdown had been lifted which officials had placed on the city during the peak of the crisis. By then, the infections had largely burned out, only 6 new cases in the 4 weeks after. They got 92.9% (9,899,828) of the city to “participate”, with medical review and DNA test for the virus (test tube brush up the nose). They found not a single symptomatic new case. They did find 300 people who carried the virus but were not sick (no symptoms whatsoever). Then came the kicker. They assessed 1,174 close contacts of these “asymptomatic carriers”. And how many of them had the virus? ZERO. That’s right, as in zip, zilch, nada. You can read it for yourself here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w. * There’s more in the paper, of course, but mostly it details characteristics of the “asymptomatic carriers”.
If asymptomatic transmission of coronavirus is not happening, and it appears with scientific certainty it is not, then all of the current lock-down regulations, mask wearing requirements and social distancing rules/decrees are based on a complete fallacy of false assumptions. Our betters tell us to “respect the science”. Well?
Sundance cites a longer article from an economics journal that goes into depth about the fallacy of asymptomatic spread and the damage being done by measures dictated to protect us from something that is not happening https://www.aier.org/article/asymptomatic-spread-revisited/. I’m saving it for later, as I wanted to get out the Wuhan finding.
Let me close today with one more citation. I’m sure I’m not the only boomer getting ever more fed up with those taking away my liberties in the name of protecting me and others. A man once so popular and respected, his name followed by “…is God” was scrawled on the walls of the London venues where he played, has picked up his axe and lent his voice to an anthem for our times, penned by another revered boomer rocker. So here is Eric Clapton singing Van Morrison’s “Stand and Deliver” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMkV4vYr_ik. The words are simple and true, and I’m sure you’ll be able to sing along the second time through. It’s already been banned by Amazon and Spotify.
*Cao, S., Gan, Y., Wang, C. et al. Post-lockdown SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening in nearly ten million residents of Wuhan, China. Nat Commun11, 5917 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19802-w
Another little box landed on my doorstep today, this time with 16 oz of currants plus a pop up laundry basket I was sure I needed to bring some order to my laundry room. Lord knows how many things have come to me via Amazon, well I guess you could go to my “orders” on my Amazon page and see that precisely. I don’t go out and shop anymore, probably much to the chagrin of my local merchants. I was never much for shopping as a recreational activity, but now and then you needed something and had to go out for it. No fighting for parking places with Jeff. I do recall almost Christmas ventures hoping something would strike me as right for a loved one, but no more. Jeff Bezos in his genius has freed us of all that. Whatever you want, there it is. Wow. How can you not bequeath the man his multibillions? Too bad he’s such an ultra liberal but others of his caste have been worse. At least he’s ginned up a good sex scandal, complete with transmission of genitalia. He’ll not have a job in the Biden cabinet. Which is good, so he can keep on his mission of transforming the world’s retail market. Amazon warehouses will be quietly plunked down in obscure parts of the world all over. Press on, Jeff. I’ll keep clicking.
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