Some years back, it dawned on me I was no longer collecting, but rather amassing cookbooks. By the time this realization struck, I had nearly four thousand discrete publications on hand, only three of which did I actually consult with any regularity.

Still, it broke my heart when I had to pare down the hoard by a thousand or so. I’ve sent a few to the local libraries, given a few to friends, and hidden a few in places where my keepers won’t find them just yet (e.g., in my bedroom, above the postcard collection and behind the framed print of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights).

In the process of reducing, I decided to start scanning and saving a few of the more ephemeral pieces. These include the little brand name booklets one might pick up from the magazine rack at the grocery store, and, occasionally, little brand name booklets that dropped out of those popular women’s magazines, as well as the freebies you could send for (“please include SASE!”*).

I’ve been sharing bits and pieces of these, via other social media, and have come to this conclusion: the more the merrier. My Flickr account has the whole booklet, here
but I offer you a couple of pages below, just to get you started.

Please enjoy the early-1970s vibe, and get the munchies.

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Also, have a cat from a year and a half ago.

Forgive my random nature. I have a disorderly brain.



*For those too young to be familiar with snail-mail, SASE is Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope. You had to pay postage to get your item delivered, creased and jammed into the envelope you jammed – along with the order form – inside another envelope with proper postage stamp on it, too. Downloading pdf. files killed off that practice.

it occurs to me that even the least of us might have something to contribute, from time to time.

Even if it’s just pictures of our own little haggisses.

So here are a few of my two

Box as toboggan

File as fife

When they allow, I can go about the task of chasing Hypnos for favors. I get the sense that the wee beasties don’t much like him, though…


Now, from the darkness in the middle of the night, comes a sudden realization: my entire life, I thought what I experienced was the same as everyone else’s. I thought that, whenever we were in pitch dark, or whenever we closed our eyes, we couldn’t recognize total darkness because our little synapses continued to fire. We saw light where there was none. Sometimes, it looks like the snow on an old TV screen, sometimes moving squiggles of color, floating shapes – it can vary from person to person and moment to moment.

A friend on another social medium shared a video all about it, & I watched in my darkened room with increasing shock.

It turns out, that’s part of a brain disorder called “visual snow syndrome”, and comes with interesting comorbidities such as tinnitus, frequent migraines, and paresthesia (pins & needles), all of which I’ve assumed were also a normal part of living, simply because I have no memory of a time without them (well, the migraines started precisely on my 13th birthday, but everything else was entrenched early on).

Only about 2% of the world’s population have it. That’s a tighter score than I got on the Iowa tests in junior high school, at the >95th percentile.

So I am special.

Not that I’m going to let it go to my head, now.

The haggisses won’t allow that.

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Image from a greeting card published in the 1880s.

May your Christmas bring you much joy.

But going home was a bit of a challenge. At the time, I had nobody at home who could come pick me up, our city's public transit bus stops running before summer sunsets, and there is no taxi service within 20 miles.

Fortunately for me, a member of “voluntary extended family” was awake at midnight to receive my texts and call, and came immediately to my rescue. Had he not been there for me, though, I'd have had to sit at least seven more hours in an uncomfortable waiting room chair, until the local commuter shuttle could be called.

This prompted me to wonder if our little hospital and others like it couldn't make arrangements for an on-call courtesy transport for people under similar circumstances. I realized that, unfortunately, something like that would likely be unprofitable for any driver in a community so small (which was why our last taxi service went out of business years ago).

But with the recent news of Tesla’s latest robotaxi venture in Austin, it dawned on me that while private taxi services (even Venmo-like operations) are not necessarily business-smart out here in the sticks, self-driven cars would nevertheless be closer to ideal, especially in times of minor crisis. Not depending upon human drivers being awake in the wee hours, a public transit or subsidized version of robocab could offer affordable after-hour options.

The city services would likely need to be creative, initially, in funding the purchase of a self-driving vehicle for the community. Still, adding one small car to the city fleet, and charging a flat fee for a ride in it, anywhere in the community —or even the county — could make a huge difference for a lot of people in this tiny city.

I, for one, would then welcome our new cybernetic overlords.

In the middle years of the women’s movement – after we got the vote, but before the leaders became man-hating in general – the goal shifted toward corporate empowerment. To be more specific, the feminist aim was to shatter the “glass ceiling” that appeared to block women from those high-paying, influential executive careers.

A fair percentage of preliminary, casual negotiations had always occurred in private spaces, such as gentlemen’s clubs, gyms, golf courses (this will continue to be a great place for networking and early negotiation), and even the lavatory. As long as women had no access to those spaces, they were far more limited in their options for self-promotion than their male counterparts.

And so the women’s movement changed from pleading for liberation to demanding inclusion in all those manly spaces.

It seemed like a really good idea at the time.

I mean, what’s not to like about having the doors unbarred, having once-restricted spaces forced open for anybody to just walk right in? It’s so terribly egalitarian, right?

Further, we spent the entire of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s building up girls’ and women’s athletic programs to showcase our own distinct athletic drives and competitive spirit. Before, the only option at many schools was to be a cheerleader for the boy’s teams, and now girls horizons were expanding. “Separate but equal programs” was the rallying cry. And then, if your school district couldn’t afford to fund both a boy’s team and a girl’s team for all sports, the boys’ team was required to open up non-contact games for girls to try out… followed by girls on the boys’ football and wrestling teams, and all that will entail. With separate locker and dressing facilities, of course.

Now roll forward another half-century. Not only are female journalists allowed in men’s locker rooms, but, in the name of equality, women and girls have been required to welcome the presence of men in their dressing rooms and onto their teams, in the name of “acceptance for the transgender community.”

This is one giant man-sized step over the line, for many.

Women, on average, are smaller and weaker, and, therefore, it is argued, we deserve a protected space for those times when we are caught – literally – with our pants down.
But now we’re told if you don’t want a six-foot-two person with a “Y” chromosome, a ponytail, and a bra to beat your five-foot-six daughter senseless in an Olympic boxing match, you’re a hateful bigot. A man can be a girl if he says he is, and you have to let him into your “no boys allowed” clubhouse.

”We didn’t ask for this!’ is the common cry. Except, in fact, the feminists did, and we enthusiastically echoed them. They spent half a century promoting the fiction that women and men were interchangeable, and, for the longest time, we swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. Most of us never stopped to think it through to the logical conclusion: demanding an even playing field to compete head-on with men will almost always put us at a solid disadvantage.

We’re not built for that.

As a species, we were designed for compatibility, for yin and yang, from our earliest hunter/gatherer days (especially in breeding, child-rearing, and other basics of species survival).

The question I have is, are we too far gone to find the necessary middle ground? How do we gain that necessary balance in a modern society which seems instead to be bent on reductio ad absurdam?

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I'm depressed. My kid sister decided to scold family and friends on FB today, with this:

One month ago, I retired from Federal service. It was a privilege to work for the safety mission and the public for 27 years. Every day my colleagues and I worked to "promote the general welfare" of the people of the United States.

I lived/worked through many presidential transitions, always trying to find a way to help the new appointees meet the goals of the new administration while adhering to the authorities granted to us by Congress. In other words, following the rule of law to accomplish our mission.

What we are seeing now in this administration will cost lives. You won't see it today or even next week, but in 2 years. When your friend/neighbor/loved one doesn't come home as a result of an injury or illness or outright neglect, remember to ask if it was worth it.

Federal employees are fighting for YOUR lives. Don't sell them out so cheaply.

IMO she was probably one of those few genuinely conscientious people to draw a paycheck on the taxpayer's dime, but, because she's lived nearly her entire adult life in public service, she has never been forced to hear the horror stories the rest of us endure when dealing with bureaucrats, whether well-meaning or otherwise. She assumes that, because her research indicates some people are safer if certain regulations are implemented, there must be a mandate, and more people should be hired to research and create more mandates, to protect people from themselves.

It is the fault of the bureaucrats, well-meaning and otherwise, sanctimoniously justifying abuses of power "for the good of all," that we don't trust the bureaucracy. Those who have lived within the bureaucracy believe that the current administration is breaking the system, while those who have lived with its uglier consequences – in overreach, partisan applications, etc. – have recognized that the system, for us, was broken long ago. This administration is merely sweeping away all the sharp pieces and clearing the path for a better (we hope) rebuild.

The majority of American voters are actually demanding freedom from a helicopter-parenting government, with good reason. Governmom may have been great at protecting us from jumping off the roof wearing a towel as a cape, but she didn’t object to letting her many boyfriends move in and steal our lawn-mowing earnings to buy their hookers and blow.

Sadly, I will never be able to persuade my sister that any viewpoint other than her own might have legitimacy, here. To her, a single person who might come to harm because her office wasn’t fully staffed to prevent public stupidity means Orange Man Bad. And that, of course, means that anyone who supports him must also support people dying of injury or neglect, because that kind of thing never happened on previous “good” administrations’ watches.


As President Reagan once pointed out, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” means something entirely different to the majority of Americans than it does to government employees. It’s a pity I’ll never be able to persuade my own sister of this.

She’ll still tell us that without her preferred (massively intrusive) form of government, the puppy is gonna get it.

For the past few days, there has been discussion anent RFK Jr's proposal, in the name of the nation's physical and fiscal health, to place strict limits on what can be purchased with food assistance subsidies.

I am in favor of this. Have no doubt about it, as a reformed citizen, a former recipient of the taxpayers' largesse, I can see much virtue in narrowing the so-called "junk food" highway to a single cow path.

However, it has been demonstrated that those convenience foods most despised for their empty calories are also laden with sugars and other additives which make them highly addictive. As in, the body develops a need for them, and deprived of them, will let its occupant know rather painfully. Converting away from a diet of cheese curls and Orange Crush to carrot slaw and orange roughy isn't like flipping a switch in your head. For many, it brings long years of literal, diagnosed food obsession, which impedes reasoned thinking and basic function as much as any other severe prolonged craving might. It's not a simple moral failing, it's a body and mind breaking down, which then will require healing and rebuilding in a healthier manner.

In the same parcel with Kennedy's proposal (along with amending the diet of the poor in America), is the demand for further public aid reform.

The US government bureaucrats created Welfare programs, knowing full well people would become dependent upon them. That was the aim: a dependent population is a compliant population. Welfare was, and is, a powerful drug.

People who are addicted to that drug come in many shapes, sizes, and degrees of need. There are multi-generational addict families, and among them are those who act as though it is their absolute right to continue to take what had once been freely offered to their grandparents. The natural impulse is to cut off their supply of this drug, without compunction. It would feel good to slap the smug off their faces when they learn they're not the bosses. But then, along with the self-entitled addict is the one whose entire life has one soul-crushing event after another, all tied to family dependency. And the one who could not reach out for a chance at success, out of fear of the unknown. The people of low self-esteem, limited experience, and obviously limited resources to gain either do not deserve to be treated as pariahs, as moral degenerates, for their failings.

If we are to wean the dependent of the opiate that our own people – for three generations and more – have handed out like penny candy on Halloween, the process needs to be like any other detox program: customized as much as possible to the individual, and firm, but most of all, with compassion.

The last of these goes toward all, not because we necessarily believe that every Welfare addict needs it, but because of our own need for a free American society also to be humane.