Friday Flames | 6.14.24
A weekly synopsis of what we figured out about boys, beer, Birkenstocks, bananas, and back-to-back bereavement.
Magda can tell it's really summer now because her hot flashes, which were controlled easily by HRT during the cooler months, have returned with a vengeance. Now, they pop out at the mere mention of an alcoholic beverage or if she gets less than 80 ounces of water in her on a given day. On one hand, it's nice to be able to avoid the hot flashes by simply drinking water instead of booze. But on the other hand, it's summer, and she wants a beer.
When she was a little kid, Magda would visit her great-great aunt Hazel, a widow who didn't have children of her own but had intensely aunted two dozen kids across three generations. In the summer, Aunt Hazel would sit in her house dress on the front porch, waiting for the breeze and drinking beer from a can inside a coozy from her life insurance company. Magda's parents didn't drink much, so she found Aunt Hazel's beer consumption kind of shocking. Years later, it was revealed that Aunt Hazel had been nursing one can of Lite beer for hours every day. She liked the taste of it and the freedom to drink beer in her own house, but she didn't want to be drunk. Maybe too much beer triggered hot flashes in Aunt Hazel, too.
Embers in the News
Here are some of the links that peeked through the noisy news cycle this week:
Worm science! Why does the U.S. spend $15 million every year to airdrop millions of sterilized screwworms over Panama? (How’s that for clickbait?)
Dicks of our lives At 98, Dick Van Dyke became the oldest actor to win a Daytime Emmy award, as a guest on Magda’s beloved Days of Our Lives.
Banana republic, literally A U.S. court has determined that Chiquita bananas spent $1.7 million over six years to finance terrorism.
“Succession” in sandals A lot of the 250 years of palace intrigue behind the Birkenstock brand happened in an actual palace!
This week on the podcast
Our boys have become young men in a culture that hasn't really figured out what masculinity is. All we can hope is that we've given them enough to define it confidently for themselves.
Episode 49: Can boys express emotion in a culture that doesn't want to hear it?
Currently reading
Magda really loved Michael McDonald's memoir What A Fool Believes. The writing isn’t noticeable, but his honesty about the decisions he's made and the ways he has hurt himself and others, along with his passion for making music, won her over. He reckons with how much he loves both his parents despite the damage they did to him as a kid that nearly derailed him dozens of times. He just seems like a good person working hard to be a better person.
Doug traveled up to Okemos (through a developing tornado, it turns out) to meet Katie Williams, author of My Murder. From the innovative and macabre detail of her very entertaining novel, it makes complete sense that she started reading Stephen King novels when she was six.
Currently watching
Doug’s viewing week included two DNFs that tried to film great books. Noah Baumbach made White Noise’s pacing overwhelming to underscore the theme that modern life is overwhelming, and it grew tiresome. And Shawn Levy’s All the Light We Cannot See is beautiful and flat and undone by Mark Ruffalo’s terrible accent.
On a recent plane ride, Magda was thrilled to finally watch an entire episode of Unsellable Houses, an HGTV show about twins who fix up houses that haven't sold. She had started this show (which is inexplicably an hour long instead of the half hour that could tell the story) on four previous plane rides, only to land before the big reveal. Big shock: white cabinets in the kitchen, and they knocked out a wall.
Currently cooking
Magda is making soft food because someone in the house just had dental surgery. Last night it was baked mac and cheese; Mike uses the Joy of Cooking recipe, but Magda freestyles it with multiple cheeses, garlic, sour cream, and mustard to make the flavor more intense. Tonight will feature the second appearance of palak paneer.
Doug will abandon his oven during the heat wave that will dominate the rest of June in favor of slow-cooker summer soups. This potato leek recipe is a banger, chilled down and topped with a little fennel seed.
Next on the podcast
Many 50-year-olds grapple with losing a parent, sending a kid to college, losing a job, or saying goodbye to a home. Catherine Connors, author of
, talks about what it’s like when all of those things happen all at once.Thanks for reading, and just leave all the madness in yesterday.
Magda and Doug