Grade 4 I think, I was allowed to stay up on Thursday nights from 10 to 11 to watch Kolchak, The Night Stalker. The understanding I couldn’t complain of being tired the next morning or complain about bad dreams. I was the center of attention the next day at school where everyone wanted to know what happened as no one else was allowed to watch :)
Olive oil is becoming a big dollar thing around here. Between here and the coast there are several craft olive oil places, some that even feature olive oil tasting. I have never done that. But we have places around us that have 10-12 different flavored oils, from garlic to jalapeno.
My local Sainsbury’s does single producer Tuscan & Greek kalamata oils on their own finest range, an Italian PDO and a Palestinian fairtrade which is really nice too.
I’m gonna be honest, I’ve gone to places that have tasting bars for olive oil and vinegars? I love that stuff. It can be pricey, so I only get those kinds for rare occasions.
We want to do one too. From what I’ve read you can even get off, rent a bike, and keep pace with the ship for a day if you feel like biking it. That’s appealing to me.
If you ever go on a cruise, take the kitchen tour. It’s astonishing.
Going on a cruise is like the least ecologically fucked-up way for anyone who lives in the lower 48 to see Glacier Bay. Cruise ships have tiny per-capita carbon footprints.
The first cruise I went on, we dined every night with a woman who started out working on cruise ships and, having moved on to other challenging work (she worked in oil fields in Alberta) took cruises every time she vacationed. She had a pretty solid line on cruising as a socially-responsible use of resources, and was of the opinion that the parts of the industry she’d worked in (Royal Caribbean, mostly) were non-terrible.
Dire warnings that the Internet was running out of bandwidth.
This was the book. This was the right cover. Not sure of the year of publication, as this book went through a few printings. I’m gonna say late 60’s / early 70’s though.
I was reading nothing but series books back then, and my parents really didn’t think the Hardy Boys or Rick Brant or the Three Investigators was challenging enough for me.
Every birthday and Christmas, they’d buy me another old “Classic” they thought I’d like. “Treasure Island”, etc. But I ignored those old classics, and kept reading my series books, sometimes many times each. I never got tired of them.
Then one day, my buddy Richard gave me this book:
And my world changed. I thought it was hilarious. Don Martin became my new hero. I read it repeatedly. Mom and Dad desperately wanted me back to the Hardy Boys.
That book had me in stitches as a kid. I wonder if I still have it. There’s boxes of books squirreled away in my basement.
I may have posted this before, and it may belong in the “brush with celebrities” thread, but stop me if you’ve heard this.
When I was 14 or 15 my best friend Brian Tucker and I would occasionally ditch school and take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan just to bum around in the city (this would have been '66 or '67). One day we found ourselves in front of the building housing the Mad offices, and being fans, decided we would go up and request a tour.
Surprisingly they agreed, and we were treated like royalty. The things I remember most was meeting Bill Gaines, who had a mockup of the view of the Manhattan skyline from his window replacing the real thing, except for a giant King Kong head peering in, being disappointed to learn that Don Martin actually worked from his home in Florida and mailed everything in, and being given a dozen advance copies of the next issue not yet on the newsstands - the one with the Star Trek parody on the cover.
Mostly I remember how gracious everyone was to take the time to show a couple of schmucky little kids around and give them an opportunity to meet some of their heroes.
That’s cool. Don Martin was my favorite also. He was kind of like a pre- Gary Larson.
I guess no one there actually looked like Alfred E Neuman? You didn’t see a white spy or a black spy lurking about?
No spies, and the only sign of Neuman was a portrait in the lobby
This. Do you remember the folding page that would reveal a different picture. I remember studying the ingenious ways those would work.
60s-70s MAD was f-ing brilliant. Sergio, Martin, Jaffee, all the rest of the usual gang of idiots… this weird combo of socially-acceptable zaniness and anarchism
I used to ride my bike to the corner grocery store and get me a Mad Magazine when they came out. Loved the movie parodies, even when I hadn’t seen the movie. And Don Martin was amazing.
Talking about desserts today at work, this came to mind back when I was a kid, this stuff was at EVERY family party.
I have’t seen it now for probably 20 years.
That’s because it’s fucking disgusting. The 80s thing with hyper-sweet soft/foamy/mushy deserts deserved to die.
If presented with it, I’d eat it and then pretend to feel guilty about it and claim that it was just a mushy throwback.
Ambrosia is the absolute dog’s bollocks, you kale-consuming hyperbiotic millennial pinheads