Zing! Went the Strings of My Wallet

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

How can something so sweeeeeet be artificial? It’s real to me …

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“But what is it?” my friend asked.

I repeated what I had just said: “It’s a Starbucks ‘Caramel Apple Spice.'” (I think I even said “Starbucks,” even though we were at that moment sitting in a Starbucks and we certainly knew where we were, because it is impossible to mistake a Starbucks for any other anything. But sometimes when I open my mouth, an advertisement flies out.)

“Yes, but caramel apple spice what? Coffee? Tea? Soup?”

I did not have an answer. What is it indeed? “I don’t think it’s coffee.” I fell back on the charm of insane repetition, something I have not perfected over the years: “Its a Starbucks Caramel Apple Spice,” and I used my eyebrows to tell my friend that she wanted her own cup of one, too. (Picture Groucho Marx.)
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Today in History: September 12

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“No public worship is tolerated by Act of Assembly but to those that profess faith in Christ, and therefore Jewish worship is not to be allowed.”—Colonial New York Assembly.

A Jewish community in New York submitted a petition to New York’s Colonial Governor, Thomas Dongan, on this date in 1695, in which it requested permission to worship openly. This was new in itself, and Governor Dongan submitted the petition to the state assembly. This level of respect was new, too. The petition was denied, as quoted above. The Jewish community continued to worship in secrecy.

Unrelated to the above, there is a park named after governor Dongan in my hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York.

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A French teenager accidentally discovered the entrance to Lascaux cave in France on this date in 1940. Once inside, he became the first human to gaze at the extensive Paleolithic era wall paintings in thousands of years. At 17,000 years old, the paintings are not the oldest in the world or in France—many of the paintings in Chauvet Cave are more than 30,000 years old—but Lascaux may be the most famous site of its sort. (One image from Lascaux is at top.)
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Nice Haircut

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Years of haircuts experienced on the hair-bearing side taught me the wrong lesson: that I could do it for/to myself and save money.

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Among the many things that are better left to professionals—piloting a jet, performing almost any surgery, copy editing—cutting hair always should be included. I did not know this until the day I learned it.

Cutting hair looks so easy. The professionals talk to you and even chat amongst themselves while they are doing it, for crying out loud. (Some will even use the word “amongst” while talking: “Your dark hairs are here, amongst the gray ones.”) How do they do that? If you interrupt me while I am merrily typing away, I will pretty much stop typing and begin to glare at you until you decide to ask someone else whatever it is you came to ask me. And how do you know where I live anyway?

One of my barbers back in the early 2000s was a World War II Navy vet who loved to tell stories from his war years while he was wielding his scissors around my scalp. (He was of the old school: No clippers for his customers. “Why give them a cut that they can give themselves?” he would ask-declare. Little did he know how well I knew that lesson. See below.)
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