RANDOM THOUGHTS NOT FRENCH: SGT PEPPER, TALIBAN, iPHONES, AND MORE #2

SGT. PEPPER

Music is essential. Spotily brings classical music to our house in the morning, jazz in the evening. When I need to, I put on my headphones and let Led Zeppelin get loud. Very essential.

But I need more room on the shelves in my office and my CD collection is so old school. So I'm verifying that all of the tunes on all of my CDs have been ripped to my portable hard drive. (I only ripped my favorites on some of them.) As a result, I've been listening to stuff that I have put aside for a while. In that vein, I listened to St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (SPLHCB), all the way through, from start to finish without stopping, for the first time in over 30 years. At least.

I'm going to pick nits. SPLHCB is not my favorite Beatles album. Revolver is. SPLHCB is basically a pop album, and their pop is my least favorite Beatles music. Fully half of the songs on SPLHCB fail to impress. On Revolver, only Yellow Submarine doesn't work for me. And that may be because I don't have kids. On SPLHCB, my favorite may well be Within You Without You. Yes, I'm one of those folks who enjoys Harrison's work at least as much as Lennon/McCartney's. Maybe more.

Oh, and Ringo is the best drummer ever. Only the fact that his drumming is so damn appropriate to the song draws your attention to it.

AFGHANISTAN

Like a virus, unless they are totally flushed from the system, the Taliban were always going to recur. The question was never whether or not the Taliban would attempt to return to where they left off twenty years ago. The only question was whether or not they would succeed in doing so. And that turned out to be no question at all.

Get in. Punish the Taliban. Kill bin Laden. Get out. That was the mission.

Why have we waited twenty years to leave? Is there any chance that we have learned our lesson? Is there any chance that the USofA will turn itself into a modern, slightly decadent European-modeled social democracy any time soon? Hope springs eternal...

iPHONES

If I ever return to the USofA again, and if I happen to find myself near the cemetery where Steve Jobs is buried, I just may stop by to give the SOB a piece of my mind.

I used to own a perfectly good tablet with WiFi that cost under $100 that connected me to the internet whenever I needed to. I used to own a flip phone that cost less than $50 that made and received telephone calls with ease. (You remember telephone calls, don't you? You called a friend and you talked to them. Actually talked.)

Noticing my ancient phones, friends made fun of me. It became a running joke. I didn't care. But then, suddenly, tragedy struck. I was gifted an iPhone 7 from a friend who had upgraded. Hearing that, another friend pulled an old 5 out of a desk drawer to give to Cathey. Both phones were kind of funky, chipped and cracked. But displays weren't effected and they worked just fine. And just like that, we became addicted. Like crack cocaine, all that it took was one hit. And now, Cathey and I each carry an iPhone Xr.

If I find Steve Jobs' grave...

STUPID

It's no longer funny. It's hard to remain polite. I don't care if Eric Clapton is tired of dealing with it.

COVID is real. It's killing people, possibly twice more than the official count. The hospitals are full of unvaccinated people dying of COVID. Hospitals are NOT full of people having bad reactions to the vaccine. Refusing to wear a mask in public spaces is not a choice. It's attempted manslaughter.

We got into this mess by abiding stupidity in too many aspects of our lives. The herd has not been sufficiently thinned. I don't know how we make up for this failure to adhere to the laws of natural selection.

RESTAURANT TEN, UZES: RESTAURANT REVIEW

Ten sits just off the market square in Uzes, one of the prettiest villages in southern France. The newly renovated space is airy and comfortable with tables of sufficient size and sufficiently spaced to provide for a pleasant dining experience. Service was cheerful, fully bilingual, and attentive without being overbearing. The food presented well to both eye and tongue. And the rate of approximately 30 € per person for a party of five included starters, mains, a dessert or two, two bottles of local wine, and coffees at the finish. Reasonable if not cheap eats. So why am I hesitant to give an unqualified thumbs up? It took me a while to figure it out. Uzes is a quintessentially French village in a quintessentially French region of southern France. There are those who will say that the Languedoc is just as beautiful but less crowded and less expensive than its eastern neighbors. I know. I'm one of those people. But the fact remains that for many people, villages like Uzes are t

Kreuz Market vs. Smitty’s Market: Texas Barbecue in Lockhart

I was born and raised in New Jersey. I didn’t taste Texas barbecue until I was twenty-two years old. What the hell do I know about barbecue? And what could I add to the millions of words that have been written on the subject? Well, I know a bit about food. I’ve managed to check out a few of the finer joints in Texas – Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in Dallas, Joe Cotton’s in Robstown before the fire, the dear departed Williams Smokehouse in Houston, and the incomparable New Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville . So I can speak from a reasonably wide experience. This will not be a comprehensive discussion of the relative merits of Texas barbecue as opposed to the fare available in places like Memphis or the Carolinas. It’s simply a take on our recent visits to Lockhart and the relative merits of Smitty’s versus Kreuz from our point of view. I’ll get all over academic in a later post. On our way out to the ranch in Crystal City, we stopped at Smitty’s. You have to look

LE CHAT QUI PECHE (THE CAT THAT FISHES), ARGELIERS: RESTAURANT REVIEW

You would think that after over five years of searching for restaurants serving good food at reasonable prices, I would have made my way to Le Chat Qui Peche before now. After all, it's only about ten minutes from our house, in a beautiful spot along the Canal du Midi. But it took a friend to suggest that we would like the place. So we went. And we did. Port-Argeliers isn't much a port, just a spot along the Canal du Midi that boats use as a stopping place. Like a town that might be described as just a wide spot in the road, there hardly seems to be a reason for it to exist other than the fact that it does. So Le Chat Qui Peche, at the foot of a narrow but driveable bridge over the canal, commands a view of the canal that can't reasonably be described as bustling and scenery that might best be described as bucolic. We were among the first to arrive on a lazy summer day, breezy so we chose an outdoor table with less of a view but sheltered. Our server practiced his

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