Friday Flames: Taking the garbage out

And other revelations about curve balls, the Granite State, infidelity, murder, revenge, lies, Dave Matthews, and feta cheese brownies.

Happy November, and welcome to this unique, liminal space between Halloween and Election Day, floating ominously like the placid eye of a horrorcane. Magda had finally settled into accepting that she wasn't going to recognize many of the cultural references in the kids’ Halloween costumes, and then everyone who rang their doorbell was dressed as something classic: a cheerleader, a trio of pirates, Cowgirl Barbie, a dinosaur. Does that mean anything? Probably not.

Meanwhile, the presidential campaigns neared the finish line with one candidate delivering optimistic rhetoric to 75,000 adoring fans in front of the White House, and the other in a wet garbage truck in Green Bay.

And yet, we’re told this race is somehow still competitive.

Months and months of crazy pills have led us to this addled place. Did we mean to email everyone a copy of the edited Episode 62 transcript? Of course not. But at least now you know that even though Substack’s AI version is serviceable, Magda works hard each week to fill in the gaps, spruce up the grammar, and make sure her name is not spelled “Magda Pechin Yazarin.”

Amid all the customary smiling and nodding we’re doing to mask our churning insides, the podcast will be off next week. Magda will serve at her usual perch as a precinct chairperson in Detroit, and Doug will be canvassing and GOTVing and carpooling voters to the polls. (Carpolling?) With a little providence, when we resume on November 13 the country will have taken out this particular garbage for good.

Embers in the News

Here are some of the links that peeked through the noisy news cycle last month:

• Live free or die (gruesomely) Exhaustive research shows that New Hampshire, with the most haunted houses per capita, has the most Halloween spirit.

• And it’s not rigged, dammit While in space, astronauts can’t cry, eat bread, or take hot showers. But they can still vote.

• Better than joints for joint pain? Semaglutide, the active ingredient in anti-obesity drugs like Ozempic, provides arthritis relief on a par with opioid drugs.

• And no, it’s not menopause There is actually a meteorological and a biological reason why 60 degrees feels different in the fall than in the spring.

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Recently on the podcast

Aya Yasukawa-Dudzinski's sandwich parenting stands astride tween daughters in the U.S. and her parents in Japan. The physical distance is the far easier gulf to overcome.

Magda had a great time at her husband's first high school reunion over the age of 50, and Doug knows firsthand that Gretchen Whitmer smells better than Gavin Newsom.

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Currently reading

Magda read the stunning Stay True by Hua Hsu, a memoir about Hsu's Berkeley years and his friendship with someone he viewed as a total opposite. Ths memoir is so located in time and place and will resonate even more with anyone born in 1977, but it's still a balm and a callback to all of us who used music to survive to full adulthood.

To offset the plodding pace of The Fraud, Doug is reading The Physics of Baseball, which offers up exquisitely nerdy analysis of the compression when bat meets ball, minuscule reaction times, the surface tension when a curveball drops 70 inches, and much more proof that baseball is impossible. (Also: The Yankees can eat it.)

Currently watching

Right after Bad Monkey and Slow Horses ended, AppleTV+ bounced right back with Shrinking (people who, down deep, really love each other) and Disclaimer (people who, down deep, really don’t). Doug is predictably enthralled with Cate Blanchett, and Alfonso Cuarón’s storytelling genius makes it very troubling to watch her life fall apart.

Magda and Mike are caught up with Season 4 of Only Murders In The Building. Was it self-indulgent, bloated, and facile? Of course. Was that inevitable? Also of course. Let's see if they can push through the clichés and get back to basics in Season 5. Magda also watched Sweet Bobby and Anatomy of Lies, and now she doesn't trust anyone.

Currently cooking

Magda’s entire week consisted of winging it on the food front, and it all worked out, eventually. The biggest issue is reducing the amount they cook on weeks when there aren't any kids in the house. Mike is used to cooking for kids who eat a lot, and that doesn't work when he and Magda are home alone.

Doug’s continues making recipes that manage to go viral online, just to see if all the orgiastic “to die for” commentary is worth anything. He took some leftover feta cheese to make these low-carb feta cheese brownies that are not to die for. But they taste a whole lot better than you think they do.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll all get through this together.

Magda and Doug