MR WRONG: Your trash overfloweth
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 99
BUSINESS DEP'T.
"IF ALL GOES well," the Indignity Morning Podcast usually concludes, "we will talk again tomorrow." Or "...on Monday," if it's on the weekend. Well, yes. This week, Monday rolled around and your Indignity Morning Podcast host's voice, already erratic, just wasn't there. Nor was the physical and mental stamina to type up the kind of items that you, the readers of the Indignity newsletter product, have come to expect.
So the week proceeded, or failed to proceed, from the standpoint of your inbox:
Then came today:
The faint upper line there is for "control," and it's faint because that part of the test didn't even have time to darken up before the "sample" part went TILT and your editor fled to the bedroom to sit out the brightest, longest days of the year, replacing what would have been a full schedule of activities with isolation and despair. Apparently New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, continuing her spree of highly effective leadership, said today that she'd like to ban masks from the subway.
We will talk again...someday! But not tomorrow!
COLUMN DEP’T.
MR WRONG: This Garbage Can Is No Place for My Nice Clean Hands
I WENT TO the “Price Club” the other day, the “big box store,” I think they used to call them, or is that something else? This is the one where you can buy in Mass Quantities to save money, and it’s great as long as you have the space to store a 36-pack of toilet paper and stuff. I am blessed to be a homeowner with a basement so I have no complaints. Anyway, I have “memberships” to two of these price clubs, one of them is better, and I kinda joined that one on accident, because a buncha my family was going on a trip and you had to buy the trip through that Price Club, but it was a deal, and I had a good time. Anyway, I am veering already, sorry.
One of these Price Clubs is closer to my castle, so that’s the one I go to more, and it’s not as good as the other one, which is Costco, and I’m not gonna say the name of the one I’m talking about today, but its initials are B and J, okay?
When I go to the Price Club, my first order of Consumer Business is to get a tankful of discount gasoline before I go inside, because if I don’t load up on the cheap gas before I get inside, I will become so besotted with self-satisfaction from all the Bargains I scored inside the Price Club that on my way out I will load up my car and forget to go to the gas pumps. Also there’s a Taco Bell on the same parking lot, just saying.
OK, after I avail myself of the gas pump, before I commence to making groceries, I gotta wash my hands. Ever since the Global Pandemic started I have been extra-more aware of making sure I have clean hands, even more so than I have ever been in my life, and longtime readers of this column will recall my simple yet, I think, highly effective exhortation to the Public, to wit: Go Wash Your hands.
If you wash your hands you reduce the odds of absorbing some Pestilence that you picked up, on your primary tactile contact with the physical world! You get stuff on your hands and then you scratch your face or rub your eyes—which you should never do, but good luck trying to not do that.
So I am now in the lavatory of the Price Club, and I wash my hands enough, I think, even though there’s almost never any hot water in places like this, but there’s soap, at least, and now it’s time to dry my hands, and I have a choice between an air hand dryer or paper towel. Unless it’s a really good air dryer,
I don’t have the patience for that, because I insist on Complete Dryness, so I grab a paper towel and dry my hands, and now I am holding my fully charged, sopping wet with washed-hands-juice paper towel, and the fucking trash can is one of those ones with the spring-loaded Flap on the front part, and it’s been a big day at the Price Club, lots of hand-washing and paper-toweling, and there have been several abortive attempts to get the loaded paper towels past the Flap, but nobody wants to touch the Flap, you know? I don’t want to touch the Flap! It’s got paper-towel juice all over it and there are filthy moist paper towels trapped halfway between the Outside World and the interior of the trash receptacle, not to mention paper towels all over the floor because people tried to just kinda smoosh it in really fast but were defeated by the Flap, and the rebound ended up on the floor, and who’s doing that, picking up a wet paper towel off the floor?
I saw the recent Dune 2 movie and figured I would take the “knife goes in slow” approach to defeat the Flap, but I ended up with it lodged on the bottom rim of the orifice, trapped by the bottom of the Flap. Defeated by the Flap!
This is a Health Emergency, seriously, there is a disincentive to hand washing if you’re going to end up getting the filth of strangers all over your fingers trying to dispose of your own personal disgusting effluvia! I demand a Manhattan Project of throwing away paper towels! Fight the Flap!
The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly. No refunds. Write Wrong: wrongcolumn@gmail.com.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
MOSTLY BEFORE I fell ill, and for a little while when the fever broke, I typed up a piece for Defector about being part of the opinion-having public, by engaging with a robocall from the Rasmussen Reports political polling firm:
Tom Scocca
Now the robot asked if I thought the election outcome would be affected by cheating. Here was the box that right-minded defenders of democracy had been building for themselves since 2020: because Donald Trump lied about that election being stolen, the idea that elections could be stolen at all became a right-wing one—even as Trump loyalists set out to meddle in the 2024 election, hoping it might work this time. They're purging voter rolls! But their effort to cheat in the election through fake attempts to crack down on cheating depends on the public perception that cheating is a problem, as ascertained by Rasmussen Reports landline polling. I falsely told the robot I was not worried about cheating in the election.
Joe wrote about his Father's Day over at Flaming Hydra.
Joe Macleod
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
CLICK ON THIS box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast:
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich (serve before the soup) selected from Mrs. Ericsson Hammond's Salad Appetizer Cook Book, by Maria Matilda Ericsson Hammond. Published in 1924, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Lobster with Olives a la Maximilian
Homard aux Olives a la Maximilian
For Six Persons
Twelve slices of bread, four tablespoons of butter, a small lobster, eight olives, a teaspoon of anchovy paste, four to five pickled green gherkins, one half teaspoon of mustard, pepper and salt.
How to Make It. Butter the twelve slices of bread and cut them out with a medium patty cutter. Chop one gherkin, two olives, and the smallest piece of the lobster, leaving the best part of the lobster for decoration. Add the anchovy paste, mustard, pepper and salt to taste, and mix it with the butter that has been stirred to a cream. Spread this mixture on six of the slices, the other slices of bread put on the top with the butter up. In the center of each put one of the olives that has been stuffed with the mixture and arrange all around the lobster meat from the tails and the claws that have been cut in heavy strips, Julienne style, about an inch in length and in between each put gherkin that is cut the same way. The rest of the stirred butter put in a paper bag that holds a fine tube and circle it all around the lobster and gherkins forming a net. The rest of the butter color a heavy orange shade with the butter coloring and decorate the olives with this butter. Leave in the ice-box until ready to serve; arrange in the form of a ring on a platter. Put in between each sandwich one of the small lobster claws and in the center put the head shell of the lobster with the addition of the tail and with sprigs of parsley in the head. Serve before the soup.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the gathering heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, available for purchase at SHOPULA.
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