Posts

Posted on

Snow Ice Cream Recipe

For some reason with the temperatures going subzero and several inches of snow predicted, the idea of snow ice cream came to mind. Plus this is truly a fond memory of my childhood. Probably about once a winter when we were smaller my mother would make snow ice cream for us. It was an exciting and delicious treat.  I don’t really know, but I imagine she learned it from her mother, aka Mama Carr.  Without further ado…

Recipe for Snow Ice Cream

Ingredients

1 cup milk (any kind)
1/3 cup granulated white sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 pinch salt
8 cups clean snow – more or less, depending on the density of the snow – This is where some judgement comes into play. Not all snow is good for the recipe.  A nice , fluffy snow works best.

Instructions

In a large bowl, whisk milk, sugar, vanilla and salt together until combined. Go scoop up some fresh (clean!) snow, and immediately stir it into the milk mixture until you reach your desired consistency. (The ice cream should be fluffy, not runny. But it melts quickly, so dive in quickly.)  But do remember as Frank Zappa admonished, “don’t eat the yellow snow!”

There are a bunch of different recipes out there, including some that use condensed milk.  This one however is closest to my mother’s recipe.  Making snow ice cream was always a group effort… back in the day.

Subscribe to Curmudgeon Alley

Posted on

Matchy, Matchy

Well, I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller skates
You’ve got a brand-new key
I think that we should get together
And try them on to see
~~ from the 1971 song by Melanie, Brand New Key

Yesterday, I was in one of those big box stores, well Walmart on Manchester, if you must know. I was walking down the main aisle between the registers and the merchandise displays, looking for a right turn that would take me back to the electronics department. In front of me, I noticed a twenty something couple.  What got my attention was that they both had hair dyed a strange shade of dark purple. At first, I thought them a lesbian couple, but one of them from the backside was obviously male.

My father after his first stroke lost a lot of his filters.  He was prone to say things vaguely inappropriate to complete strangers. He at least had an excuse. I have not had a stroke – thankfully, but sometimes I think I need a zipper on my mouth.

As I neared to them, I said, “Wow, matchy, matchy.”

The female of the two turned to me Continue reading “Matchy, Matchy”

Posted on

Quote of the Day – Stephen Colbert

Quote of the Day… not actually daily, but whenever I encounter one I think worth sharing and there are not too many in sequence.  I like quotes as they frequently distill a piece of wisdom into a brief passage, or make other points very succinctly – such as the witticisms of Oscar Wilde.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” ~~ Stephen Colbert

To see more Quotes for Day, visit this link: Quotes for the Day

Subscribe to Curmudgeon Alley

Posted on

Trump’s Letter to Prime Minister of Norway

Here is the letter that Trump wrote to the Prime Minister of Norway.  It has been verified by several sources including Norway’s Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

I don’t care what universe you reside in or what your political leanings are, that is bat shit crazy to the nth degree.

There must not be too many poker players in the Continue reading “Trump’s Letter to Prime Minister of Norway”

Posted on

Matrimonial Log – Star Date 5786.020

“Matrimony… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Casamiento Segundo, its until-death-do-us-part mission… to explore a strange new relationship… to seek out a new life and new adventures… to boldly go where no sane couple has gone before.”

In our bedroom, on my dresser, is one of those candles in jar.  It was originally put there as a decoration.  Over time it has morphed into a, shall we say, “signaling” device if one of us is feeling, shall we say, “feisty”.

A while back I was in such a mood. Señora was still downstairs finishing up whatever movie or program she was watching.  I had lit the candle, put on some soft New Agey music from my music server onto the bedroom television, set the screen display to off, and crawled into bed with, as Dickens might have said, great expectations.


Señora finally came upstairs and went into the bathroom to do her nightly ablutions before retiring.  Exiting the bathroom, she walked past the dresser, and without missing a step, she blew out the candle.  That shot that was heard around the world was my bubble bursting. Perhaps that was kinder than “not tonight dear, I have a headache”, perhaps.

Fast forward a few months.  I came home only to find that Señora was not there, running around doing this or that, keeping herself occupied.  I walked upstairs and into our bedroom and almost immediately noticed that the candle was no longer on the dresser.  Thinking to myself – can you do it any other way – well, I reckon that chapter of my life has passed into senescence.  I then noticed that everything on the dresser was out of place. Señora had been dusting in the bedroom, and had moved everything around, pushing the candle to the back behind a picture, obviously failing to return the items to their original and expected positions.

Whew, dodged that bullet… at least for now.

Subscribe to Curmudgeon Alley

Posted on

Bob Dylan Say Hello to Paul Krugman

Normally, I do not put out two postings in one day, but today I could not resist. The video of Bob Dylan at the end of this posting was the coda to Paul Krugman‘s newsletter today.

On the off chance you are not familiar with Krugman, he is a Nobel Laureate in Economics, the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and was a columnist with the New York Times for nearly 30 years until the newspaper made a sharp turn to the right and more or less ran him off.  I suppose he is considered a Liberal, I find him to be a little left of center and one of the sanest voices currently in American politics. I used to read him regularly before the newspaper went behind a paywall.  A friend recently gifted me a free subscription to his newsletter on SubStack, which is where he went with his heavily factual opinion pieces after his stint at the New York Times.

Listening to Dylan started me thinking of other times.  I graduated high school in North Kingstown, RI,  in 1970.  For many of us of Continue reading “Bob Dylan Say Hello to Paul Krugman”

Posted on

Quote of the Day – Samuel Butler

Quote of the Day… not actually daily, but whenever I encounter one I think worth sharing and there are not too many in sequence.  I like quotes as they frequently distill a piece of wisdom into a brief passage, or make other points very succinctly – such as the witticisms of Oscar Wilde.


“The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”  ~~ Samuel Butler

To see more Quotes for Day, visit this link: Quotes for the Day

Subscribe to Curmudgeon Alley

Posted on

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #4,622

yeah I know you did not ask!

You should so be blessed – well cursed at times actually – with a mind such as mine, making all these weird connections between my rumored neurons. Just be thankful that I do not share all of my random thoughts.

One random thought that I occasionally have while in the throne room “meditating” is why did not the supposed Intelligent Designer makes us photosynthetic creatures. In that case I would be excreting O2  and H2O after producing a nutritious sugar with CO2 and H2O.

Talk about your little green men!

Just saying.

At one point in my life I could have written out the whole chain of chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis or for that matter the Krebs Cycle. Not much call for that when you are twiddling bits and bytes.

Subscribe to Curmudgeon Alley

Posted on

Nicknames for He Who Shall Not Be Named

Trigger warning: This is going to get crude… fast.

Giving nicknames to politicians has long been a popular American pastime, especially for those occupying the White House.  The current occupant stinking up the Oval Office, however, has spawned a whole cottage industry generating euphemisms and nicknames for him.  This quasi-humanoid has an extreme pathological need for attention, which reminds me of a psychology precept from Transactional Analysis, “a soggy potato chip is better than no potato chip.”

One of the ones that I see  most often is tRump, emphasizing the rump part of his name, which to my way of thinking is much too polite. On occasion I have riffed on that one and used tArse.

From the title of this article, He Who Shall Not be Named, obviously a reference to the villainous warlock of the Harry Potter series of books. In Mexico this becomes Innombrable, interesting enough one of the few examples of when it takes fewer Spanish words for a concept than in English. It may be common in other parts of Latin America, but I visit with a few Mexicans on iTalki so I know a little bit more about there. 

Speaking of Spanish, I frequently refer to him as El pendejo, which over time has morphed to El puta pendejo, then El puta pendejo naranja. If you are not up on your Spanish curse words I will let you put these phrases into Google translator yourself. One of the things about Google translator is that it will take the crudest of comments and translate them to something somewhat milder.

I was talking about the current cluster f*** that is the politics in the United States, and I used El puta pendejo with one of my tutors who lives north of Mexico City.  Normally I stay very proper with my tutors except Continue reading “Nicknames for He Who Shall Not Be Named”

Posted on

Quote of the Day – Publius Cornelius Tacitus

Quote of the Day… not actually daily, but whenever I encounter one I think worth sharing and there are not too many in sequence.  I like quotes as they frequently distill a piece of wisdom into a brief passage, or make other points very succinctly – such as the witticisms of Oscar Wilde.

“Mental and moral excellence requires peace and quietness.” ~~ Publius Cornelius Tacitus

I’ve been more than a little dark lately.  I was going through my pending posts trying to find one lighter.  Apparently I have been dark for a while. This quote, however, is very applicable to our current times of over stimulation by media in 42 different directions.

Om Mani Padme Hum…

To see more Quotes for Day, visit this link: Quotes for the Day

Subscribe to Curmudgeon Alley