The song I chose for tonight is probably in my personal top 10 favorites. The song is “Waterloo Sunset.” It is by the Kinks, was written by Ray Davies, and is on their 1967 album Something Else. It was released as a single at the time and made the top 10 in Britain, but made nary a dent in the U.S. pop charts. I just think it’s a lovely song.

It was September 1969. The future Mrs. Pessimist and her roommate had moved into the apartment just above the one that my two roommates and I occupied. My two friends had asked them out for pizza and I met my future bride that night when they came back to our apartment. Strangely enough, I was actually studying for a college assignment and had not joined them. That was the last time she saw me studying for quite some time. I heard my roommates talking later that night about how hot Mrs. Pessimist was and I decided I should preempt any attempt on their part to claim her affections. I went up to her apartment the next day and invited her to a Jose Feliciano concert that was scheduled for later that week. My enthusiasm and Jose’s romantic charm made for a delightful first date.

So she invited me up to her apartment the next day. Her roommate was working the evening shift at the hospital. She cooked the best meal I have ever eaten although I suspect it might have been the first meal she had ever cooked. She served store-bought breaded veal patties sautéed in a pan with mozzarella cheese on top with a side of canned Franco-American spaghetti. I didn’t know that spaghetti came in a can but it was absolutely delicious. They don’t make that anymore. The closest thing is Spaghettios which is not nearly the same.

Former president Barack Obama “[spoke] some truths” about his problem with the relatively low enthusiasm for Vice President Harris’s presidential bid compared to his own 16 years ago. His stern remarks, delivered at a campaign field office in Pittsburgh, were particularly directed at “the brothers,” whom he believes may be reluctant to support Harris because they “aren’t feeling the idea” of having a female president.

Looking back at my life, I find many examples of interests that come and go. Sometimes I will become quite passionate about something, even obsessed, for a while, before dropping it unceremoniously and moving on to something else. I used to view this as a character flaw, a short attention span; but as I have gotten older I have realized that it comes instead from a desire to constantly seek out new things to learn. I tend to take on hobbies and pursue them long enough to get a feel for what they’re like. But once I reach the “been there, done that” stage, I lose interest.

One of the earliest of these flings was acting. My entire career as a stage actor was coextensive with my years in high school. When I say “career,” of course, what I mean is that I was active in the drama club; I auditioned for pretty much every play, and I always got cast. That was my main extracurricular activity in high school, and in fact, I lettered in drama. (I still have the sew-on letter somewhere, but I never bought a letter jacket to attach it to.) There were at least two big productions each school year, one in the fall and one in the spring, and occasional smaller ones; it seemed that I was always auditioning or rehearsing for something.

As Halloween approaches, many of us will think of the 1978 film Halloween. Some of us even have the theme music going through our heads right now. That music is as iconic as the theme from Psycho, but Bernard Herman, not Alfred Hitchcock wrote Psycho’s theme. John Carpenter didn’t merely direct Halloween, he wrote the music, too. And he wrote the screenplay. This is a talented guy.

It was great fun to hear this talented but cranky man, John Carpenter, in person, at Joe Bob Briggs’ International Drive-In Jamboree at the West Wind Drive-In in Las Vegas. He’d been invited to talk about his filmmaking career. Last year, at the Fourth Annual Jamboree, the honored filmmaker was Roger Corman in his last interview.

Carpenter was introduced with a fun montage with scenes from Starman, Christine, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, They Live, Vampires, The Fog, and others mentioned throughout this post. His first, a student project made at USC that received a theatrical release, came out in 1974. And his last film, The Ward, was released in 2010. He is 76 years old and for the last decade and a half, he has concentrated on music.

I have often described Judaism like a wagon wheel on a road. The wheel turns, and so in a sense, we are going through a cycle each and every day, and each and every year. A wheel in a wheel, as the gospel song goes.

The difference between Judaism and classic circular religions (basically all religions that model themselves after the natural world with its seasons), is that our wheel is not suspended in space. Instead, we are bouncing along a road. We have an origin, and we have a destination. And it is the touchpoints of the road that give us continuity and a sense of belonging. It is why we sing familiar melodies. We reground at the very same time as we look forward.

Seven years ago, the Fatal Sunday audiobook was released. I have improved a lot as a narrator since then, so it’s a little painful to listen to this one, but it is one of my all-time favorites of the 86 books I’ve narrated. George Washington was under a lot of pressure to get a victory, after performing a miracle rebuilding his army at Valley Forge. There were folks in the Continental Congress who wanted to replace him. This fatal Sunday in New Jersey was truly a crucial point in the Revolutionary War. I still have some promo codes for a free Audible download if you would like to listen to it.

Yesterday, reassurance,  if you’re a normie, anyway.  James Cleverly (I never thought he was all that) seemed to have a clear path to the “final two” in the elimination rounds for the Tory leadership contest.

We were down to three candidates,  The leader was James Cleverly!  Oh, happy day!  The “traditional” candidate.  The “continuity” candidate.   The Telegraph (with one notable exception) was delighted!  Cleverly, outspoken supporter of the recently deposed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. More of the same.  Sigh.

Today, Whoops!  All I can say is that there must have been some serious “strategic voting” going on in the past couple of rounds.

It is my old refrigerator/freezer that I moved into the garage when its ice maker quit. I use it mostly as a chest drawer freezer and a beer cooler. He seemed happy with the arrangement, but in the past three weeks, I noticed that I needed to recycle the settings to keep him cool and happy. When my beer is warm, I can tell something is wrong. I told him that I knew I had been ignoring him lately, but asked if he couldn’t hang on for a few more weeks. He didn’t say a thing and just seemed to smile as he sat silently, holding all my thawing meats in his belly.

So tonight I had to scrub a large cooler and fill it with the thawing meats. It is a lot of meat. I don’t know what I will do with it. Some can refreeze in the kitchen freezer. Maybe I will have a post-hurricane party and cook it all.