Friday Flames: The merciful end of Knucklehead Week

And other revelations about fungus, chaos, rejection, Barbra, and what we really shouldn't try to digest anymore.

Hello, everyone! It’s Doug here, writing on World Menopause Day about the merciful end to what will go down in history as Knucklehead Week—named for the house painters who have invaded my brain. The Knuckleheads are Marty and Dennis, two portly, fortysomething baritones who have been scraping and pounding and flaying the house facade for three days. As proof of his superior intelligence, Harry the cat goes under the bed at around 9am and doesn’t re-emerge until well after dark.

The Knuckleheads might be each other’s best friends. Marty thinks Dennis’s girlfriend is great, and he should just marry her already. Dennis thinks Marty’s new car is boss and still can’t believe that guy bought the old one, which still had that smell from when Marty’s wife threw up in the back after that Lions game. Marty likes Sublime and Smash Mouth and has a massive JBL bluetooth speaker with 36 hours of battery life. I have seen both their coin slots.

They’re genuinely fun to talk to. Marty courteously handed me my sodden mail after he power-washed the front brickface. Dennis always takes pictures of the house numbers now before he removes them, because he’s replaced them in the wrong order a couple times. Dennis has five kids with his ex, and Marty has seven. None of them is rich, Dennis says with a grin, but they’re all happy.

It’s not their fault that they’ve infiltrated my psyche. But they’re there, everpresent, scraping and pounding. On top of that, I’ve had insomnia three times this week, once after a very spicy dinner (see below). I’m goggle-eyed and cranky, the cold has emboldened my arthritis, my stomach hurts, and somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me.

Is this even close to what menopause feels like? If so, my empathy just grew by three sizes.

Embers in the News

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

• One set of footprints After a 79yo woman broke her leg while hiking, several strangers teamed up to bandage her, ease her pain, and carry her to safety.

• What could go wrong? To add 3,400 jobs and $16 billion to Pennsylvania's GDP, Three Mile Island will reopen in 2028 to serve Microsoft’s data centers.

• Turns out, 75 isn’t really middle age You know how it was believed that someone already born would live to 150? New research says that’s unlikely.

• One reason not to drink mushroom coffee A scientist showed how fungi have memories, learn shapes, and can make decisions and solve problems.

---

Recently on the podcast

In order to help reconcile her past family dysfunction, Carlotta Stankiewicz is getting remarried, leaving her job, and reassessing almost every plan she had for her future.

Men and women reacted very differently to the VP candidates’ debate. Which got us thinking about how, later in life, understanding each other seems like a lot more work.

---

Currently reading

Magda is 25 hours into the 48-hour audiobook of Barbra Streisand's My Name Is Barbra and beginning to think she and Barbra are personal friends. She's reading Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection by Jia Jiang. She’ll let you know if she's invincible in approximately 102 days.

Doug thought James was brilliant. Now he is back in purge mode, using all the extra boxes from his son’s college move to fill with more books to donate. Amid the culling, he found and started Scott Elledge’s biography of E.B. White. Never too late to learn more about your heroes.

Currently watching

After three tries, Doug gave up on the painfully unfunny fourth season of OMITB. But, inspired by his son studying the Theranos fraud at college, he stayed on Hulu for The Dropout, one of those shows he always planned to watch but hadn’t. It stands out among the raft of similar Grift Leads to Downfall shows, mostly because of Amanda Seyfried’s oddball charisma.

Magda and Mike discovered that every episode of Saturday Night Live is available on Peacock, so they started at S1 E1 from October 11, 1975. They can manage to watch one episode a day, mostly because Magda thinks the first season isn’t all that funny. But she predicts that, like any reality show, there will be a huge increase in quality from Season 1 to Season 2 and an even bigger increase from Season 2 to Season 3.

Currently cooking

Magda has been freestyling a lot in the kitchen, with mixed results. The coconut curry lentils were mediocre because she used brown lentils instead of red, and she used too much broth in the chicken stroganoff. But the turkeyherder's pie was delicious, mostly because she added lots of Worcestershire sauce and used yellow potatoes for the top layer. Don't be afraid to dream.

Doug attempted the somewhat-viral chile crisp fettuccine alfredo with spinach recipe, with mixed results. He made it with a super-spicy habanero chile crisp that was delicious going down, mostly because the heavy cream helped put out the fire. But that night he got about 45 minutes of sleep. YMMV.

Thanks for reading, and extreme hot sauce might just be in the rear-view window.

Magda and Doug