Indignity Vol. 2, No. 104: The Year in Review

OK! SO MUCH for the year 2022. Thank you for reading your twice-weekly Indignity email newsletters, and we hope you are also reading Popula—where we publish even more often, and get other people to publish things, too.

This is our 104th email of the year. Among the more popular ones were our conversation with Alex Pareene about how terrible cars are, our post about how Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler let the facts about abortion get away from him, and an item about how it would be good to treat a criminal ex-president as a criminal. Among the less popular ones were a newsletter about the dollar sign and about an old fort for sale, an Ask the Sophist column about whether or not to ditch a winery tour for a child's soccer game, and a transmission from _T_H_E___M_A_C_H_I_N_E_S_ about how Tesla automobiles were being recalled to stop them from rolling through stop signs. We stand by our decision to publish all of them. We also published an intermittent series of brief podcasts about the Baltimore Orioles and whole lot of short items about the Wordle results, but we didn't email (most of) them to you on purpose.

Now on to our very special YEAR IN REVIEW segments.

2022 in Review: The Year in Raptors

IN JANUARY, I raised the blinds in the bedroom and right out the back window was an adult Cooper's hawk, perching upright. It looked huge.

In May I saw a bald eagle hunkered down in a sod field up the road from where I grew up.

In September I interviewed the woman who filmed a red-tailed hawk diving into a garbage can by Morningside Park to kill and retrieve a rat.

In November I tried and failed to take a picture of a red-tailed hawk in the air.

I didn't publish anything about it but in two different times in December, in Morningside Park, I saw a red-tailed hawk fly up low and settle onto a prominent perch—once on top of a flagpole, once in a tree right over my head—only to be surrounded and strafed by blue jays until it gave up and flapped away. The second time, with the hawk in the tree, I was looking nearly straight up from below, so when the first jay flew in, I saw the gray and white underfeathers instead of the blue top feathers, and for a moment I got the scale all wrong and thought it was a titmouse and the titmouse might potentially be in trouble. The jays were absolutely not in any trouble. The hawk barely even tried to hold its spot before fleeing.

2022 in Review: The Year in Snacks

BY JOE MACLEOD

WOW, WHAT A year, eh? I know, it was terrible, like the last one, and the one before, and—hey, are you detecting a pattern?

Anyway, one thing I can count on in the shittiest of shit-crap-garbage-trash-fuck years is solace in the simple act of snacking, and here are the standouts for me in the previous steaming pile of days we ingested in 2022:

Dot’s Cheese Curls: Wowsers, these are not made for folks who deal in regular cheese curls such as Cheetos and Cheez Doodles and Jax! These Dot’s jawns are super-loaded with flavor, and cheese, and salt, and other stuff, yow, normally I can blaze through at least a half of a full-size bag of any of those normal cheese curls, but the Dot’s, these are like, you could just put out, like, five of ‘em, five curls, on a cheese board with some of those fancy little pickles and super-thin sliced meats from the fancy deli, seriously, it’d be enough. Based on the sheer density of ingredients slathered onto these things, they were well worth the three hundred percent difference in price compared to the regular cheese ones, but they’e kinda too good, does that make sense? Weird recommend!

Utz Old Fashioned Sourdough Hards Pretzels: Yeah, “Hards,” this is the name the Utz company insists on branding their hard pretzels, but these things are perfect, pretzel-wise, incredible bang for your buck as far as giant salt crystals and dense, substantial pretzels go, perfect for slowing down your munch, like you could chow down a whole bag of regular-whatever potato chips in the time it would take you to work on three or four of these monster pretzels.

Oysters: I could eat a hundred of these things and then sit down to a full-course meal, so they qualify as a snack. Oh, oysters are disgusting, you couldn’t ever eat one? Cool, fine.

Fried noodles at a Chinese restaurant: This is a perfect snack because it’s not an appetizer, it’s a thing that gets plunked down on the table at a Chinese restaurant before you even order anything! The fun part is I always ask myself if it makes any sense to put plum sauce or mustard on the fried noodles, so I always put both. I ordered the Beef Ho Fun with Broccoli.

Hot dog (at a baseball game): Errbody gets all twisted about “is hot dog a sandwich” or not, and I say it’s a hot dog, it can be whatever it wants to be! In this case, at a baseball game, it’s a snack in between beers in between innings!

Ballpark nachos: Terrible! Don’t ever get these, ugh, what was I thinking? The briny jalapeno slices did nothing to help. Ugh, what a ripoff, I coulda had another hot dog.

Utz Cheese Balls: I know, I already did the crazy atomic Dot’s cheese-thing product, but this is in the other direction, super light and melty, and you could even get fancy and eat ‘em with a toothpick if you want, and that way you don’t get the cheese dust on your fingers, but also that means you don’t have an excuse to lick your fingers after you eat a buncha cheese balls, is that weird?

Wellsley Farms Italian-Style Meatballs, 5 lbs.: More balls! They come in a 5 lb. bag, and you don’t have to eat the whole bag all at once, OK? These suckers are the perfect little meat-snack when you are bargaining with yourself about how you shouldn’t have a carb-snack, and there is a mathematical equation on the bag that tells you how to microwave exactly the amount of meatballs you are going to put in your mouth.

Cookies: This is a picture of some cookies my wife baked. It’s hard to see, but they had walnuts and M&M’s in ‘em, and I’m sorry you weren’t around when these came outta the oven, ohhh, wow. I ate like, five of ‘em with a glass of milk, like a child. I’m not too proud to admit this, and I will do it again as soon as I can make my belt work at the third spot for the buckle instead of the second.

Paté at the expensive French restaurant we only eat at when we get a gift certificate: If you are frontin’ at the fancy French restaurant like we do, where we generally cannot afford to ever order a whole meal and just end up getting drinks and a snack, order the paté and tell ‘em to double the amount of toast or bread or whatever, because it super extends the snack, and it’s never enough for a meal, so it’s a snack.

The gas line on my goddamn grill: This was 2022 Snack of the Year for a goddamn squirrel that climbed up on my deck. They like to chew on the rubber gas lines, who knew? Cost me two hundred bucks to replace the whole stupid line and gas jet assembly, hope you enjoyed  it, squirrel.

Garbage skwushy white bread and KRAFT Singles “grilled cheese” sandwich: KRAFT doesn’t even bother calling this shit “cheese,” but dammit, go ahead and make yourself a “grilled cheese” with this stuff, oh wow.

A pack of crackers from the diner: If you order soup at the diner, make sure to swipe some extra crackers, because at some point in the coming year you are going to be in the house looking for a snack and the cupboard might be bare, and this will hit the spot.

Super-expensive cherries for cocktails: These things are like $25 a jar, but  every time I dropped one in a cocktail or a Coke or a fizzy water, wow, it became a classy fun drink with a snack built in! Cheers! Fuck last year! Ever forward!

VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS DEP’T.

The Year in Blurry Photos

SANDWICH RECIPE DEP’T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of a select sandwich from The White House Cook Book; A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home, by Hugo Ziemann and Mrs. F. L. Gillette (Fanny Lemira), now in the public domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

EGG SANDWICHES.

HARD boil some very fresh eggs and when cold cut them into moderately thin slices and lay them between some bread and butter cut as thin as possible; season them with pepper, salt and nutmeg. For picnic parties, or when one is traveling, these sandwiches are far preferable to hard-boiled eggs au naturel.

MUSHROOM SANDWICHES.

MINCE beef tongue and boiled mushrooms together, add French mustard and spread between buttered bread.

CHEESE SANDWICHES.

THESE are extremely nice and are very easily made. Take one hard-boiled egg, a quarter of a pound of common cheese grated, half a teaspoonful of salt, half a teaspoonful of pepper, half a teaspoonful of mustard, one tablespoonful of melted butter, and one tablespoonful of vinegar or cold water. Take the yolk of the egg and put it into a small bowl and crumble it down, put into it the butter and mix it smooth with a spoon, then add the salt, pepper, mustard and the cheese, mixing each well. Then put in the tablespoonful of vinegar, which will make it the proper thickness. If vinegar is not relished, then use cold water instead. Spread this between two biscuits or pieces of oat-cake, and you could not require a better sandwich. Some people will prefer the sandwiches less highly seasoned. In that case, season to taste.

If you decide to prepare and enjoy a sandwich or sandwiches inspired by these offerings, kindly send a picture to us at indignity@indignity.net.

Thank you for reading Indignity! We appreciate your interest and support, and we encourage you to find more of our work over at Popula.