“Nothing Doing On Police,” Cast Iron Mnemonics; Tiers Of The Clowns

“Saucepans in summer, crepe pans in fall, when winter’s upon us, there’s food for us all.” – Dr. Niles Crane

Our Spirit Guide’s mnemonic device for remembering the Kitchen Rules of Life sprang to mind with the arrival of a new cast iron dutch oven – the latest addition to our bunker’s Kitchen Arsenal.

We’re working on some new recipes ahead of the late spring/early summer bumper crops we’re expecting, trying to come up with a few new things to do with poblanos (oooh).

On the Hard News Front (how’s that for a segue?) we’re getting fragmentary reports of burglaries, pepper-spray dousing, colliding e-bikes, barricaded dudes and police pursuits from our ever-growing Flash Battalions but it’s not like the Old Days when you could saunter into the squad room and ask Sarge “what’s happening on police?” -the traditional response memorialized in a newsman’s poem pinned to the press room wall in the 30s.

It’s almost as if they don’t want us/you to know what’s going on (naw, that can’t be it… can it?). Anyway, we’re putting it all together when we can.

Let’s see – this morning started off with a boating accident and people in the water at Orwood in Brentwood (four transported to local hospitals) and we’re glad they were retrieved quickly ’cause it’s far too chilly to be in the water at this hour. We’ve also lost some pedestrians to car collisions recently, few if any receiving any official notice and we guess that’s part of this new paradigm, too. Oddly, we took some civilian flak for “too real” and “unsettling” photos from the many scenes we cover and, we’ll admit, that stopped us for a bit because – believe us – what we run is not 1/10th as bad as what we see. We guess perceptions of reality depend on your idea of what’s real or not because we also received video of one of those Every 15 Minutes programs at a local high school and, dearie me with full pearl clutching, that production looked like the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan.

Daring to raise the dreaded “P” Word and talk politics we feel it safe to say the local political scene was turned on its head recently when the weight of sexual abuse allegations against a local Democratic congressman ended with his withdrawal from the state gubernatorial race and his seat in Congress. That a Republican congressman who had managed to fend off similar claims for some time also resigned was little consolation to those concerned by the hardening standards of a two-tier justice system which has proved all too willing to look the other way when the timing is right.

With the sun-kissed seasons approaching we’re braced for a little more rain the next few days, holding our breath that people have learned their lesson for negotiating rain-slick roads and hoping all we have to worry about is finding a recipe for stuffed poblanos.

It won’t happen, but we can dream – can’t we?