Post-Birthday Odds & Odds

The only thing special about birthdays for me is the cake, and I got one on my birthday recently and almost immediately my family lit into it. A nice quarter-sheet vanilla on vanilla it was, since Yuriko reacts adversely to chocolate with rashes and itching.

Within 24 hours, the cake was a shadow of its former self, and after 48, only a memory. The label on the box promised the “moistest cake you ever ate.” Indeed, it was pretty moist, but I haven’t been keeping precise track on cake moistness throughout my life, so that must remain unverified. First ingredient: not sugar, but water. Pretty good cake for a grocery-store bakery cake. It’s all about the icing, anyway.

Note to the truck driver behind me in the center lane of the three-lane highway on the way to the airport last week. No, make that a big middle-finger of a message to the jerk: Honking at me will not make me speed up, especially when there’s someone in front of me, nor move to the right lane, when the left lane was perfectly clear for you to pass me. In other words, his honking – maybe four times over as many minutes – was just him saying, move over, insect.

I was going about 5 mph over speed limit at the time, which is fairly typical for me, and more-or-less in synch with the rest of the traffic. But when someone tailgates so assholically, I go into full passive-aggressive mode, and slowly ease down to the speed limit, or a little lower. I suppose there’s some risk to this, but if you brake ever so gently, probably not that much – no more than you already are in, because of the fool tailgater. And it’s so satisfying. Eventually the trucker went around me to the left, at which time I sped up again. Also satisfying.

Remarkably good show, The Rockford Files. Got Vol. 1, No. 1 on disk not long ago, and watched for the first time in 30-odd years. I could tell, and later I read, that the writers of that show knew their Chandler and Hammett. Jim Rockford isn’t exactly Marlowe or Spade, but he owes something of his character to them, something I wouldn’t have appreciated when I first watched the shows.

The Chandleresque elements of the stories were combined with 1970s updates, which besides certain hair and clothing styles also meant car chases. I’d forgotten how important they were in ’70s detective shows, but they all had them—Cannon, Mannix, Harry-O, maybe even Barnaby Jones, though he might have been the exception.