It’s not like they didn’t warn us.

Yesterday it was a 112 degrees in Portland, Oregon.

But I don’t live in Portland, Oregon.

Ever been in weather that hot? I have, in Sharm El Sheik. Back when it was still part of Israel, before it was given back to Egypt, when it was a tent city as opposed to a built-up resort. One day it was 121 degrees, another 123. What I remember most vividly is drinking seven bottles of the equivalent of 7-Up and not having to pee, that’s how much I was sweating.

But I don’t live in Sharm El Sheik either.

But I do live in Southern California, where I never know when I must vacate my house because of fire danger.

And then there’s the Delta variant. It’s all over the news, assuming you read the news. Then again, Tucker Carlson constantly implies that you should not get vaccinated while he won’t say whether he’s gotten the jab or not. Hmm… Anyway, in Israel and Australia they’re back to wearing masks, I guess they’re willing to give up their “freedom.” Yes, in Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, and Australia, where the strict quarantine of those entering the country, even citizens, kept Covid at bay. As for Melbourne, they locked down the city even though infections were in the single digits, as in LESS THAN TEN! Because you stamp out a flickering flame before it becomes a conflagration.

Now the truth is in unvaccinated parts of the country, Covid-19 cases are rising, but it doesn’t feel like they are, so it must not be happening. But then it happens to you. Too bad if you’re an American. Because the country was built on individual freedom, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and if anything goes wrong you’re on your own, we don’t bother to help you, or if we do you’re labeled a taker, and you circle your wagons and endure the hardship as the rest of the population ignores you.

It’s not like they haven’t been talking about global warming. They renamed it “climate change,” learning from Frank Luntz that branding is everything and in truth, parts of the globe can become colder while others become hotter.

And then it happened. Drastic cold in the northeast. And it was 118 degrees in Siberia last week. But nobody bothers to lift a finger.

We’re leaning towards authoritarianism, it looks like it’s going to happen. Yes, the left has been complaining about the death of democracy ever since the southern states started enacting voter suppression laws. But the real problem isn’t the voting laws as much as our form of government. Nothing can get done. Doesn’t happen this way in China…President Xi comes up with the plan and it’s executed, and you toe the line or you’re incarcerated. I’m not saying that I approve of what Xi is doing to the Uighurs, or Hong Kong, but the truth is they just built a ten story building in China in a day, and they’re in the middle of an infrastructure boom, highways and railroads everywhere, meanwhile America falls apart in a game of musical chairs, where you just hope you’re not in the building or on the highway when it gives out.

Nothing can get done in America.

Furthermore, the country can’t even get on the same page. There’s endless tribalism and misinformation and the truth is we can’t get everybody to agree, so nothing gets done. As for the right, their goal is to return is to a golden age of white America when things weren’t that good to begin with, as for the left…they must be wrong, they must be fought, because if the right is flawed the left must be too. It’s an endless debate of false equivalencies, although the truth is as a result of cable news and the internet you never have to see news you disagree with, your prejudices are reinforced and you should read the studies about getting people to change their minds…when confronted with the facts, they usually just double-down.

We’re past the tipping point. There may be a recall in California, but there’s no way a Republican can win, the state is far different than it was when the Terminator replaced Gray Davis and proved that government is a skilled job and experience counts.

And getting a Republican elected in a major urban center is also a nonstarter. So the divide gets wider, the south hunkers down, not radically different from the Confederate states of yore, they want to preserve their culture, irrelevant of the consequences.

As for the public?

Jeff Bezos can afford to personally jet himself into the stratosphere, but Amazon can’t have unions, collective bargaining, they must depend upon the benevolence of Jeff’s farm. And unions have a bad name, as do regulations. Come on, a building collapses in Florida and all the experts say that never happens in America. Why? BECAUSE OF REGULATIONS!

Or you sign a contract of adhesion causing you to go to arbitration where the corporation always wins.

But you live outside the battle, you’ve experienced no consequences, and then suddenly you do and…it’s just too bad, you’ve got to lose so the wheels of progress can move forward. Anybody can go broke as a result of medical costs, just do your best not to get sick, avoid that cancer, will you? And while you’re at it, don’t go for treatment anyway, better to roll the dice with your health than be out of pocket, never mind that your lifespan will be shortened.

The above are indisputable facts. Hiding in plain sight. I’m telling you, but the truth is people have been saying all this for years, but it falls on deaf ears.

I hope you’re vaccinated. I don’t care what your reasons for not getting the shot are, religious beliefs, distrust of the government, fear of side effects, none of those are gonna keep you safe if the Delta variant comes knocking, you’re gonna get infected and there’s a good chance you’re gonna die. As for going to a mass gathering, that’s like playing Russian roulette. Tell me, do you want to be Christopher Walken in “The Deer Hunter”? Oh, that’s right, you haven’t seen it, you were too busy watching cartoons at the multiplex.

So there’s heat in the Pacific Northwest. And little water throughout the west. The ski season has shrunk by a month over the past decades. But there are senators telling you to look at the bright side of global warming, that you won’t need a jacket, when the truth is science rules, trumps everything, and nothing happens without consequences, without an equal reaction. Who knew? US!

So one ends up feeling powerless. Greta Thunberg dedicates her life to saving the environment yet those who disagree with her don’t debate the issues, but her age, her delivery, her sex, her nationality…when the truth is the young people are going to inherit the earth, and they’re damn scared, that’s one of the main reasons they’re not having children, they can’t afford it, meanwhile all the economists are freaking out because without population growth our economy will stagnate, like in Japan. Human issues? Those aren’t important.

I feel powerless. Then there are those who say to join the system, to run for office. Now I vote, every single time, but the truth is when the game is rigged you just can’t win. That’s what all these election laws are all about, and based on a falsehood that Trump actually won the election. And Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are still in office when Al Franken had to vacate his seat, killed by his own party.

There’s nothing rotten in Denmark, but there’s plenty of decay in America. But if you point out the country’s flaws so they can be addressed you’re a disloyal un-American hater who must be isolated and castigated by the tribe, the same one that tells you to be an individual, confused yet?

And this is all happening in plain sight, it can’t go on forever.

So you can’t follow leaders, because they’re all beholden to the corporations, big money interests, and as far as those parking meters, they were all sold to hedge funds and operate on Sundays and holidays now so you’d better watch them very closely.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.

But there are no subways in rural areas.

And the billionaires don’t ride the subway and today artists are not prophets but mini-corporations who are income-ranked, message be damned.

Meanwhile, it’s over a hundred degrees in Portland and I can’t leave my house for fear of the Delta variant.

https://spoti.fi/3w2gg6y

1

Bonnie Raitt couldn’t break through.

Her initial album was cut live to four track at a summer camp in Minnesota with Spider John Koerner and Willie Murphy. This was before record labels clamored for hits, they let you find your way, especially Warner Brothers. Also, people pooh-poohed AM radio. If you were authentic, you saw it as anathema. And Bonnie was nothing if not authentic, she hewed to her blues roots, she didn’t want to sell out, and she didn’t, but her debut barely sold.

But then came “Give It Up.” Suddenly Raitt was writing her own songs, and “Nothing Seems to Matter” and “You Told Me Baby” are stellar. But so are the covers. Most notably the second side opener, Joel Zoss’s “Too Long at the Fair.”

“Won’t you come and take me home

I’ve been too long at the fair

And lord I just can’t stand it anymore”

Until 1991’s “Luck of the Draw,” “Too Long at the Fair” was my favorite Bonnie Raitt track and “Give it Up” my favorite Bonnie Raitt album. And in those days you made it via word of mouth and the road, radio oftentimes came last, Bonnie developed an audience, she could tour, but the average person still had no idea who she was. Raitt was anything but slick, you believed every word she sang, she touched your soul.

But not so much on the follow-up, 1973’s “Takin My Time.” “Takin My Time” had a much slicker sound, it was anything but rough. There were a number of excellent tracks, most notably “I Feel the Same” with its chicken pickin’, but it moved the needle on Bonnie’s career just a wee bit. Now she’d made three albums and she had an audience, but she was far from a star, she may have been enamored of Little Feat, but even that band was rarely played on FM radio at the time, and Bonnie was heard only on college and adventurous stations. So Bonnie took a hard turn to a soft sound with producer Jerry Ragavoy and ended up nowhere, neither fish nor fowl, she didn’t satiate her hard core audience and made no inroads with others. However “Streetlights” did contain a track that eventually became a classic, her cover of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” but it was anything but AM radio fodder, even AOR fodder, “Streetlights” was a detour that cost Bonnie’s career momentum. Yet if you were a fan you bought it without hearing it first and the opening track was the best, breezy yet meaningful, a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “That Song About the Midway.”

“I met you on a midway at a fair last year”

With no prior knowledge it seemed like a carny story. Yes, a tale of traveling gypsies. This was before we knew that almost every song has a backstory, and I learned that backstory Thursday night.

2

David Crosby is very intelligent, yet self-satisfied and not always informed on the issues. He’s been wrong on digital music from the get-go. He says streaming does not pay, could it be that no one is listening?

Let’s take “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” his 1971 solo LP, the worst of the initial four band members’. I bought it when it came out, it’s interesting, but does not deserve the accolades it has recently gotten. I mean if you’re really stoned… But the truth is “Music is Love” has ten million streams on Spotify and three other tracks are in seven figures but the rest are in six figures, shy of a million, considerably. Now I know that a million SOUNDS like a lot, but it isn’t. Forget that a lot of songs on Spotify have a billion streams, even two billion, the truth is if it weren’t for Spotify, digital music, no one at all would be listening to “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” because it would be out of print, completely unavailable, there’s not enough physical space to stock the entire history of rock and roll in a store, never mind the fact that you get paid ad infinitum on streaming, it’s an endless annuity, unlike a sale, whose money you probably blew.

Also, there’s a good chance “If I Could Only Remember My Name” is in the red, it cost so much to make, and with the anemic royalty rates of yore…

As for the hits, with Stills, Nash & Young… Let’s see, there are four members splitting a low royalty rate, I can see why you’re not making much, but the problem lies with the label, not Spotify. As for the publishing…it’s so valuable that Crosby could sell it to Irving Azoff for seven figures, so…

But Crosby has a new album out. He’s made five records in the past seven years, a track record no other classic rocker can equal. He’s embraced the new market wholeheartedly, that’s the new paradigm, you record new music, go on the road to promote it, and then you repeat the process. But it gets better, CROSBY CAN STILL SING! And the dirty little secret is so many stars of yore cannot, at least not very well, even though they’re on the road and people are paying to see them. I pulled up “River Rise” and was stunned, I didn’t want to turn it off immediately, I wanted to continue to listen to it. And that’s the reason David Crosby was on Howard Stern last week, promoting his new work, and I was listening Thursday night on the SiriusXM app as I was hiking, and the truth is Crosby is always fascinating to listen to.

Now if you want to be particular about it, and why not, as good as Crosby’s new music is, it could benefit from some money, to afford a first class studio with a first class engineer, the tracks sound just a little too homemade, the choruses with harmonies are great, but a pro would do just a bit better with his voice, use studio tricks so it sounded a bit less naked and alone.

And the new album, ironically entitled “For Free,” won’t make any money, but it’s a calling card, for the fans who still want to see Crosby on the road.

So Howard’s wants to get Crosby, Stills & Nash back together again. But the truth is they were back together and I saw them and I’d like to tell you the vocals were up to par, but they were not. Stills can play, but… And Stills is the star, David owns up to this, endorses it, seems like we’re gonna have to wait until Stephen Stills dies before he gets the accolades he deserves, before he gets into the pantheon.

And despite all this talk about the new album, Howard continued to ask questions about the past, and the most interesting dialogue was about Joni Mitchell, Crosby said they weren’t close, and that she’d written a breakup song about him. HUH? Which song was it?

3

Crosby set the scene. There were twenty people together in a house, probably in the canyon. And Joni showed up and said she had a new song, and everybody wanted to hear it, so she sat down with her guitar and played the song. Twice.

You see Crosby is sitting there, getting embarrassed, because everybody knows it’s about him, she’s breaking up with him via this song. Crosby and Stern go on about this, and finally it’s revealed, the song is “That Song About the Midway.”

Hmm…

I bought a new copy of “Clouds” in the early eighties, at a swap meet, it was still covered in shrinkwrap. I didn’t own it previously, one only has so much money. And the best track is “I Don’t Know Where I Stand,” which in retrospect is probably about Crosby too. And the opener, “Tin Angel,” is superb, the opposite of a Stones album intro, quiet and introspective as opposed to in-your-face. And the album ends with Joni’s take on “Both Sides Now,” which Judy Collins had already turned into a monster hit, and track four was the original “That Song About the Midway.”

I’m a big believer that the writer does the song best, but not in this case, then again Raitt and Mitchell’s versions are very different, same chord changes, same lyrics, but completely dissimilar feel. Raitt’s is an ensemble, slick, the sound supersedes the lyrics, the story seems to be told in retrospect, it doesn’t feel like it just happened yesterday. But Joni’s original is essentially just her and her guitar, and it’s her pure voice, it’s not treated like Bonnie’s is, like I’d like Crosby’s to be on his new work, it’s not a woman on stage in a theatre, it’s a singer in a coffee house, playing to forty people, it’s made to be heard, but it’s personal, it cuts right to the gut, but I still thought it was fiction, I couldn’t figure it out, until Crosby and Stern started talking about it.

So it took me the entire hike to finish the interview, the longer the better, don’t cut it short if you’ve got an interesting guest, you want to cover the ground, and when I got into my car I pulled up “That Song About the Midway” and listened with new ears.

“I met you on a midway at a fair last year

And you stood out like a ruby in a black man’s ear”

On the road, they met on the road, as part of the traveling circus of music performance, at least that’s how I remember it. And Crosby was a star, wearing his capes and…

“You were playing on the horses, you were playing on the guitar strings

You were playing like a devil wearing wings

Wearing wings you looked so grand, wearing wings”

Yes, Crosby was playing the field, his music his calling card, he was an angel, at least on the outside, but the inside?

“Do you tape them to your shoulders just to sing

Can you fly

I heard you can, can you fly

Like an eagle doin’ your hunting from the sky”

Well, these are fake wings, taped on, easily removed. Meanwhile, he’s flying like a bird of prey, circling in on…women.

“I followed with the sideshows to another town

And I found you in a trailer on the camping grounds”

Yes, every act has their own schedule, they rarely meet up on the road, but sometimes, missing their significant other, one will change their route, fly in for a little of that human touch.

“You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice

And I thought I saw you cheating once or twice, once or twice”

I literally thought it was about gambling, but now, rounding the Sunset curve by Mandeville Canyon, I finally knew the truth, yes Crosby was cheating on Joni Mitchell!

“You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice

And I thought I saw you cheating once or twice, once or twice”

Whew!!! Now it was perfectly clear, I could see the scene, Joni was the faithful one, we always hear about her leaving relationships, but in this case… It was a dagger straight to Crosby’s heart, it’s very clear.

“I heard your bid once or twice

Were you wondering was the gamble worth the price

Pack it in

I heard you did, pack it in

Was it hard to fold a hand you knew could win”

She was committed, was it really worth it to screw around and lose her? Did he not foresee the consequences?

“So lately you’ve been hiding, it was somewhere in the news”

Cheaters always hide, you can’t get a hold of them, they’re embarrassed! They hate confrontations. However they say adultery is not about the person you do it with, but the person you’re involved with, and if you only told your significant other your issues, progress could be made, instead you pull away in this sneaky way, like a weasel.

“And I’m still at these races with my ticket stubs and my blues”

When you’re deceived, when you’re abused like this, you feel so bad, you were ignorant, out of the loop, you’re still here, but they’re long gone.

She’s tired, she feels like she worked overtime on the relationship and it was all a waste of time. And then she pushes the dagger in further:

“And I envy you the valley that you’ve found”

I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY!

And they never are, because you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

https://bit.ly/35Xwe7o

People hate Padma Lakshmi. I learned this researching her after watching her Hulu food show, “Taste the Nation.” I highly recommend it. Padma travels across the nation to focus on specific cultures and the food they eat. Sure, she goes to El Paso for Mexican, in an episode entitled “Burritos at the Border,” but she gives context to the location and…did you really know about the Gullah Geechee in South Carolina? Or that Paterson, New Jersey is a hotbed of Peruvian cuisine? There are ten episodes, you can see the locations and cuisines here: https://bit.ly/3xUqes6

Now I don’t remember the last time I watched cable, whether it be network, basic or pay cable. I only watch streaming shows. Therefore, I had no idea who Padma Lakshmi was. But I found out she was the star of another cooking show and she’d been married to Salman Rushdie, who’d gone on record that she was a narcissistic self-promoter who needed to be in the public eye, who needed to be famous. So if I wrote about Lakshmi, I’d probably hear from the haters, and they’re everywhere, complaining she’s posting cooking photos to Instagram sans bra and the rest of my readers, like myself previously, would have no idea who she was.

Then again, I didn’t write when I was hot, when I was excited, before I did all my research. You see there’s a moment when you feel it, and then it passes. You’re watching something, into it, and you want to tell everybody, and then you’re over it and on to the next thing.

Which in my case was cooking shows on Netflix.

I watched a bit of “The Chef Show,” because who doesn’t like Jon Favreau? But the stories were too belabored, I couldn’t get into them.

And then there was all this hype about “High on the Hog,” so I checked it out and it was utterly fascinating going to Africa, not only seeing the roots of the food, but that the nations are not as backward as we perceive. But venerated writer Stephen Satterfield had absolutely no on screen charisma, I mean this is television, Satterfield seemed nice, but he was boring and not dynamic, I couldn’t continue.

And then I found “Fresh, Fried & Crispy.”

Fried food. Does anything taste better? My friend Jeff e-mailed me about Dave’s Hot Chicken, told me I had to go, and if you look at the picture, you’ll get an impression: https://www.daveshotchicken.com Golden brown chicken, fries, artery cloggers. I lived on this stuff growing up. But now? Now I know better, I know I’m not gonna live forever, and I might as well give myself good odds, so I eat fried food very rarely, but I still love it, my mouth still waters, ah, for some nice fried oysters or clams.

So I’m watching “Fresh, Fried & Crispy” and I’ve never heard of the host, Daym. I figured his name was like “Damn, that’s good,” but in truth it’s short for “Daymon.” In the middle of the first episode, he tells his story. Daym started out as a YouTube food blogger. He’d review fast food while eating it in his car. He said he had one clip with ten million views, I decided to look it up. And then I realized Daym’s secret to success, his reactions! Daym wasn’t analyzing the food as much as ENJOYING IT! His reactions were infectious. And he ended up with a TV show on the Travel Channel and now he’s got a Netflix show. Once again, I’d never heard of this guy. But I know how long a road it is to TV stardom, to getting a Netflix series. Hell, Seth Rogen’s a bona fide movie star and he says it takes six to seven years for him to put up a movie.

So Daym’s in St. Louis. Why? I don’t know. And he’s eating fried ravioli. Now that sounds good, doesn’t it? Turns out it’s a St. Louis specialty.

And then Daym goes to a vegan restaurant, he’s anything but a vegan, he’s a beefy Black guy, but the chef/owner of the establishment, also a person of color, tells how she makes this food and damn if it didn’t look good, especially the fake chicken.

But then Daym drove out to the hinterlands. It seemed like a farm. But I couldn’t understand the connection. You had a family, two generations, the parents and the son and his wife, and…was this just gonna be a home-cooked meal?

But it turned out the son had a restaurant in town. And he also had a very good-looking wife. Live in L.A. long enough and you think everybody outside the metropolis is backward and obese, but this is not true.

Anyway, the son, Rick Lewis, has this restaurant Grace Meat + Three, which is a southern thing, if you’ve ever been to Nashville, and his specialty is fried bologna.

Does anybody even admit to eating bologna?

Certainly not that Oscar Mayer prepackaged dreck. You’ll eat that when you’re in your single digits, when they think you’ll eat anything, but you reach a certain age and you say NO MORE! As far as Spam…we never had it in our house, but I heard the bad words.

But bologna was not a bad word in our house growing up. Funny, it was supplanted by salami by time I hit my teens. Why is that, is bologna for kids and salami for adults? And I’ve eaten plenty of salami over the past decades, but bologna?

But when I was five, fried bologna was a treat.

We lived in a split-level, with the tiniest of kitchens. Eventually, in 1962, we added an addition, a large room which included a dining table, couch, piano and TV set, but as for the kitchen? It was till tiny. But when I was growing up, it was even worse, because included in this kitchen was a dining area! Kind of like a booth at a diner.

Anyway, when I was a kid I would eat sunny side up eggs. Now I won’t touch eggs at all, in any form, forget it. I mean if you use it as an ingredient in something else, that’s fine, but if it tastes like egg? No way! And I remember my mother making said eggs, and I also remember her making fried bologna.

I don’t remember there being a cutting board, those seemed to arrive in the sixties, back in the fifties I think you just sliced on the kitchen counter, as if the linoleum or plastic or whatever it was was impenetrable, a breakthrough. Funny how we’ve gone backward. In the sixties the great leap forward was frozen vegetables in a ready to cook plastic bag, better than cans! You had this pouch of frozen vegetables you boiled in water and voila, you cut the bag and served it! This was when time-saving was of the essence, long before the cooking revolution, when the goal was still to do less work. Then again, I don’t know how my mother put a meal on the table every night. Well, not every night. Saturday my parents went out and we got hot dogs and hamburgers from the stand, and Sunday we oftentimes went out, usually for Chinese or pizza, occasionally to the Pepper Mill in Westport, a steak place. And my mother never ever made breakfast. And certainly didn’t make us lunch, we were forced to eat the food in the cafeteria, we begged her to make us sandwiches, but she never would, so the truth is she had to cook five nights a week. Then again, I still don’t know how to cook!

And my most treasured food memory from those early years was sitting at the kids’ table in the playroom watching “The Mickey Mouse Club” while eating noodles with butter, something that disappeared from the menu shortly thereafter, I think they only let little kids eat that.

And the fried bologna.

Now the truth is when I got my first apartment, in 1976, my mother sent me some kitchen stuff. And included was the pan she fried the bologna in. I got so nostalgic, I never ever used it, but I only threw it out two years ago, it was a connection to my youth. It was small, it could fit about four pieces of Hebrew National bologna at a time, and it certainly wasn’t cast iron, we never had a cast iron frying pan at home, never ever!

So first Daym watches Rick make the bologna. It’s kinda like those TV shows about the making of hot dogs, once you’ve seen it, you can’t eat them. Unless they’re skinless and all meat. Nothing worse than a bad hot dog. The Dodger Dog? Nearly inedible! But there’s no accounting for the tastes of the hoi polloi. Then again, Daym is lifting people up from the bottom, he’s meeting them where they live, in the fried food zone.

So Rick makes this giant bologna and then ages it and ultimately cuts off a giant slice to fry.

And as it sits in the pan starting to sizzle I can smell it, all the way sixty plus years back. My mother frying up that bologna. It would start to curl… Hell, we’re Jewish, we overcook EVERYTHING! Then again, I like things just shy of burned, I mean a medium-rare ribeye with char on the outside? Then again, the char’ll give you cancer. Then again, we did so much back then that we subsequently learned gave us cancer. WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING SUNTAN LOTION!

And I’m watching the TV screen mesmerized. And I almost jump up to write about it, but this was only the first episode of the series, did I really want to draw people’s attention to it?

And then I did more research. Reviews were not that fantastic. Then again, it was the highbrows weighing in, and highbrows won’t even eat fried food, they’re the people who say they’ve never ever eaten at McDonald’s, whereas I have so many times that I don’t even have to buy the burger, I can just think about it and taste it.

And I’m wondering exactly what skill, what expertise Daym is bringing to the table. I mean Guy Fieri started out in restaurants, he can go on about the ingredients, the construction, whereas Daym worked at Wal-Mart and CarMax, not known for their culinary offerings. So why exactly was I hooked by this show?

Well, Daym is likable, but it’s not like he’s a gabber, he’s not talking endlessly, it’s not like he demonstrates endless personality. I ultimately realized…IT’S THE FOOD!

The truth is America is the land of fast food. It was invented here. And now, more than ever, people here eat it. Sure, there are fast casual outfits, but they’re not fast enough! We want to get it, eat it, and be done!

And in the second episode Daym is eating freshly caught fried shrimp in a Po-Boy at Hudson’s Seafood House, on the water in Hilton Head and…

The breakout feature in “Fresh, Fried & Crispy,” the piece-de-resistance, is the immersive frying camera. Yes, instead of an underwater camera, they’ve got an under oil camera, so you can see the food cook, as they delineate the composition of the oil, the heat and the time cooked.

And then Daym goes to Treylor Park in Savannah. Unlike salt of the earth Katherine cooking at Hudson’s, the proprietor of Treylor Park cooked in New York, and then came back home to create his specialty…the Treylor Park Pot Pie. Which is actually a chicken pot pie chimichanga! They fry that sucker up and… Well, first I’d like a Dark Shark fried peach for…a peach cobbler on a stick, sometimes dessert needs to come first. Or maybe I’ll just settle for the grilled apple pie with chicken sandwich at Treylor’s.

These are normal people taking pride in their efforts to reach the culinary limits of…fried food. You worry about the lifespan of all these people, not only Daym, but the rest of the beings who eat this food. Maybe this is a contributing factor to the ever-lowering age of death in the U.S. of A. Then again, what is life about?

https://bit.ly/3daZRq6

Now this was a good rec. A number of people e-mailed me about it and then I checked RottenTomatoes and the critics score was 95 and the audience score was 98 so we decided to check it out. Glad we did, there’s not another show quite like it.

“Mr. Inbetween” is Australian. So there’s a slightly different sensibility. Australians take themselves a bit less seriously, and they’ve got a sense of humor, and they drink. But still, it’s relatable.

So the bottom line is Ray is a hitman with a regular life. A thug who’s little different from your next door neighbor other than his line of work, and a severe anger problem. You see Ray comes from the school where you’ve got to stand up for yourself, where you don’t tolerate bullies, you hit back, in some cases you even hit first, damn the consequences. And occasionally this gets him in trouble, because normal people default to the law, the rules of society, and Ray doesn’t always do this, he’s got his own sense of justice. Which is moral in its own way.

So, when he’s not the doorman at a strip joint, when he’s not off beating people up, Ray shares custody of his daughter, he gets into a relationship, he hangs with his friends, and these situations are depicted more accurately than in a year’s worth of American TV.

Ray’s daughter starts off young and loving, never mind uber-cute, but as the seasons wear on, she gets older and doesn’t want to be seen with him and has a boyfriend and starts getting into trouble and Ray has to manage all this. One of the funniest and most squeamish situations is when Ray has to tell Britt the facts of life long before she reaches puberty, when she catches Ray in bed with Ally and he’s…

As for Ally… If only relationships could be depicted this well in all series. You can love each other but the relationship still can’t work. And you don’t get over each other right away. And the speech Ally gives at her house, about trying to fix people and standing up for herself…it’s so hard to face reality and do what is good for you when it feels so bad.

So Ray’s got a father he won’t speak to. And a brother with a bad illness. Families, siblings, they’re complicated. And if you’ve been through the war with your brother or sister, you’re bonded forever, you always look out for each other.

And Ray is a good friend. Especially to Gary, his best friend.

Gary is an average guy who is constantly making bad choices, like marrying that Russian woman, but Ray shows up for him time and again, takes the heat, defuses the situation. And Gary does the same for Ray. They’re buddies. But it’s not a buddy comedy, they’re just friends. Remember when you had friends like this? Get older and they disappear.

And Gary is always looking for a way to make a buck.

And Ray takes Britt to playdates and…tries to help the parents of her friends. Life comes with so many obligations. Assuming you’re up to them, and Ray is.

This is a hard show to explain. First and foremost, the episodes are very short. Just over twenty minutes if you watch on Hulu without commercials. Half an hour on FX. And the seasons aren’t super-long, the first only has six episodes, the second eleven and the third nine. In other words, it’s not a deep commitment, you can watch an episode before bed, you don’t need to commit an hour of time. Then again, in an hour you can blast through three episodes!

And these episodes breathe. They’re not chock full of action, nor are the images dense, the writing is spare but so right on. You can tell Scott Ryan took time with them. And the banter between Ray and Gary is oftentimes priceless. When they’re waiting, need to kill time, they’ll play these little games, like what is the best this or that, and they do it just like you do with a buddy, it resonates.

But what truly resonates is the depiction of life. Few of us are going anywhere fast, we’re just trying to make a living, get by, prepare the next generation. And we’re constantly pissed at the small intrusions, the injustices. And there are power struggles, and issues of trust and…these all come up in “Mr. Inbetween,” but you’re not being hit over the head.

There’s violence and sometimes blood, but at other times it’s patently sweet. I do not know why this isn’t one of the most talked about shows out there. Maybe if it was on HBO. If it got the publicity it deserves.

“Mr. Inbetween” is a gem, I wholeheartedly recommend it.