Albert – Spotted these fine fellows by the roadside and was reminded of you and your brothers. Surely the resemblance is uncanny! Our best to Victoria and the lizards. We await the unveiling of your portrait at the Hudson. “Modern Art, harumph!” indeed! Keep basking – John & Martha & Ted & Alice

Typewriter: c.1963 Remington Holiday

(storm-prize) tr. v.: stepping outside in the morning to unexpectedly discover that it rained during the night, and you completely missed it.

Mr Efatima and I did the manly-man bonding thing by choking down a couple of these habanero burgers, billed by the pub’s owner as the world’s hottest. He may be right.

If you can get past the first few bites, it goes pretty easily, because by that point your brain’s ability to comprehend pain has burned out. I’m sure that if the heat hadn’t totally obliterated the flavor, this burger would have tasted wonderful.

Oh, and the evil bastards spiked the ketchup with chipoltes, so seeking relief by shoving a few ketchup-dipped fries in your mouth only exacerbates the heat.

The habanero burger (or hellburger, as we’ve come to call it) is also a gift that keeps on giving. Word of advice to anyone thinking about consuming one of these things: don’t do it the night before a long plane flight. You remember the scene in Alien, where John Hurt is flopping around a tabletop as the chestburster struggles to escape his body? Other than the alien invader being way down in my colon, that was me the entire flight home.

But hey, I got a free bumper sticker out of the deal. W00t!

About fifty years ago, a family took a vacation to Miami Beach, FL. They brought along their Brownie Hawkeye Flash camera and took lots of pictures of themselves having fun. They got home, finished up the roll with a couple shots of the dog, and put the camera up. Perhaps that’s the day that they bought a new camera. Maybe they set the camera down somewhere and forgot it and it became lost. Somehow, life interfered and the roll was never removed from the camera.

For fifty years.

Recently, I bought a lot of vintage cameras on eBay, and this family’s Brownie Hawkeye Flash was among them. I found the roll of film inside and decided–without much expectation–to develop it and see what was on it. Film left in cameras is notorious for not surviving. The camera inevitably gets opened, and the unsealed film is repeatedly exposed to light and high temperatures and humidity. On top of it, it had traveled with its camera through standard postal service, undoubtedly being subjected to x-rays at least once. I figured I would get, at best, a bunch of fog-covered frames with faint images of someone’s new car or kids playing in the back yard.

The results blew me away. Verichrome Pan was long heralded for its superior range of tone and fine grain. Evidently, it was made to last, too. The only alteration I made to the developing process was to push the developing time from Kodak’s recommended six minutes to eight, in the hopes that the increased time would boost the contrast enough to cut through the inevitable fog.

You can see for yourself that the pictures were almost perfect.

This lost holiday brings up many questions. Who was this family? What brought them to Florida? Why didn’t they ever get their pictures processed? Did they ever wonder what ever happened to them? Does the kid in the pictures remember that trip? What ever became of them?

I created a set for these photos on Flickr. I hope that someone, somewhere, will see them and say, “Hey, that’s Dad/my aunt/me!” If that happens to be you, please get in touch with me so I can return your photos.

My first thought was, “That’s not a food item; that’s a medical condition.” It’s worth noting that the Spotted Dick is right beside the Tripe, and that the two cans are virtually indistinguishable.

Spotted Dick, as it turns out, is a pudding desert that is somewhat popular in the UK, though its name has occasionally caused embarrassment.

I’m still not gonna eat it.

Some days are all high notes. Some days are nothing but scribbles.

Tens of thousands of geese overwinter in a small lake in the middle of town. Some communities get their feathers in a ruffle over a couple of dozen geese (like those at Covell Lake in Sioux Falls, SD), while some communities like Rochester take them in stride and accept them as part of the city’s personality. A few years ago, the city purchased a zamboni-like sidewalk cleaner for the express purpose of scrubbing goose droppings from the walkways.

The 8″ of snow they forecast turned out to be only 6″, and that collapsed to 4″ by the time I got home to blow it.

Please read in all the sexual innuendo of that statment as you please.