Redemption Sauce

Curmudgeon's Corner

Recently we were having lunch out here in Mexico, and admiring the process as the waiter prepared fresh salsa in a molcajete at our table. He commented that most gringos prefer ketchup (catsup), which he called American sauce. It started me thinking about my long relationship with, and love for, ketchup.

According to a story in National Geographic, ketchup comes from the Hokkien Chinese word, kê-tsiap, the name of a sauce derived from fermented fish. It is believed that traders brought fish sauce from Vietnam to southeastern China. The British likely encountered ketchup in Southeast Asia, returned home, and tried to replicate the fermented dark sauce. They must have taken a left at Albuquerque, though, and ended up with HP Sauce.

Ketchup was for me, like maybe a lot of kids, a way of making something not so palatable at least marginally more so. A classic example is liver & onions, which my dad loved though no one else did. Another is “roast beef”, which in my growing up meant gray and tasteless meat. But the pinnacle of ketchup’s power as a cuisine converter (redeemer?) was achieved in making my mom’s salmon croquettes edible enough that I did not get in trouble for not eating them. Sorry, mom. Redemption Sauce. Sorry Robert Nesta Marley!

When I was 9 years old, between 3^rd and 4^th grade, I had baseball practice most summer evenings. The practice field was a 4-5 block walk from home. It was on these walks hone that I collected pop bottles, which I redeemed (more redemption!) to have money for Mad magazine. I played for the Lafayette Ravens in Oklahoma City, south of the North Canadian River. The affluent lived to the north of the river. Interestingly, a city improvement effort in 2004 dammed up the usually low and slow-flowing North Canadian to create the “Oklahoma River”, which includes an Olympic-level rowing and training center. I cannot imagine rowing in the Oklahoma wind. Oil money can do surprising things.

But I digress. Baseball figures into this because my parents would often go out looking at real estate in the summer evenings. It was I guess cheap entertainment. They looked for years before we finally moved from SW 47^th to SW 97^th. This all meant that I generally came home at dusk to an empty house, with my dinner on a melamine plate, covered with foil in the massive O’Keefe & Merritt stove (it probably weighed 300 lbs.) It had a warming area with very low heat where I would find my dinner.

Not my mom's croquettes!

Salmon croquettes were in the bi-weekly rotation. They were made with canned salmon. The can looked a lot like this one, except it did not reference “natural”, “Omega-3’s”, or “wild-caught”. I am not even sure it said Alaska. A feature of that canned salmon is that it retains the bones, which are pressure cooked and thus soft. This includes vertebrae. When I winced, my mom would say, “there is a lot of calcium in those bones, they are good for you!” She was not wrong but eating a fish backbone was icky.

A leading source of calcium!

Enter ketchup. With enough catsup, the croquettes became manageable. The brand we had was Brooks Catsup. We never sprang for Heinz (I have a similar story about Zesta vs. Premium saltine crackers), which I knew was better since a neighbor had it and I had tried it. There was a Heinz TV ad back then that showed two paper towels with a dollop of Heinz on one and the “other leading brand” (Hunt’s) on the other. As you might expect, the #2 band seeped water out into the towel, while the Heinz remained steadfast, a sign of its superiority. This is no doubt due to viscosity enhancers and coagulants in the Heinz, but no matter. Heinz is still king, with a 60% share in the US and 82% in the UK.

In looking for a picture of the Brooks bottle I remembered from being a kid, I discovered to my delight that along Route 66, The Brooks Catsup Bottle water tower, south of Collinsville, IL, constructed in 1949. It is trademarked "The World's Largest Catsup Bottle". Much cooler than the catsup itself ever was. We will be driving Route 66 from Chicago to LA soon, and will be looking for it.

A final comment about the Lafayette Ravens. Lafayette was the grade school both I and my older brother Dan attended. It had an auditorium which at the time seemed cavernous, though I am sure if I saw it today, I would marvel at how tiny it was. On the right of the stage was a large portrait of George Washington, on the left, a similar portrait of Marquis de Lafayette. I was tickled when Lafayette had a starring role in the musical, Hamilton. The Ravens were 3^rd and 4^th graders, and we had a particularly good team that year, no thanks to me.  I was average at best, and inexplicably played shortstop, which is usually a skill position. It may have been tied to my inability to track down fly balls. Our success was due mostly to 3 players, a pitcher named Steve (the coach’s son), and two brothers, a year apart, Randy and Terry. As was always my experience playing sports as a young person, there were always a few guys who were just not only better skill-wise, but kind of physically precocious. This does not include the guy in 9th grade football who was actually about 16, having flunked or “been held back” a couple of years in a row.

Anyway, that year we won almost all our games (maybe we did win them all) and in the course of the season-ending tournaments, accrued something like 5 trophies. For me, it was kind of like being the equipment manager for a Super Bowl team, you still get a ring. The irony was that same year, my aforementioned brother, a far superior athlete to me, played catcher for the Southside Cobras. They won big as well, but he ended up with a single trophy that was smaller than any of my 5. He did not hesitate to point out how ridiculous it all was.

Dubiously acquired hardware?

So from molcajete and salsa to ketchup, salmon croquettes, and Little League baseball. I have read one’s memory of the past gets sharper with age, even as the more recent memories are less sharp. Who knows? Or…maybe it’s just because baseball season started again. And like the motto on our Old Guy Softball League shirts - “The older I get, the better I was”. So true.

                                                                                                 Written April; Published 2021, June (sigh)

Curmudgeon in Seat 13E

From Mark's Curmudgeon Corner

I itch to reduce your pitch!

You've just settled in to your seat for a 3-hour flight, placed your phone and Kindle and maybe your water bottle into the seat pocket in front of you, and suddenly WHAM! The person in front of you cranks back their seat with no warning or even a preliminary glance. If you are lucky, only your psyche is bruised as you ponder 3 hours of having your personal space compressed even more by the evolving airline economics over the past few decades. With less luck, you get a bump on your head, or maybe your laptop screen nearly wrenched from the keyboard. And in any case you more or less say goodbye to getting anything out of your underseat bag until the plane lands. And possibly to using your laptop at all without rotating it 90 degrees so the screen is on the tray table and the keyboard on your chest, like Gary Wright playing Dream Weaver.

Fly me high through the starry skies, maybe to an astral plane - or business class would do.

Unless you are fortunate enough to travel in business or first class, this Battle of the Recline is one of the most unpleasant, and in my opinion, unnecessary, ignominies heaped on the head of the airline traveler. Over the past 40 years, I have answered many airline surveys on 'the flight experience" (yes, I was a young curmudgeon once!) From back in the days when these came in the mail (with Business Reply Mail envelope included!) to today where they show up on you mobile phone even as the plane lands. Each and every time where there was a comment section, I have asked if they had done any studies on the cost benefit of reclining seats - cost to the person reclined into, versus benefit to the recliner. This is to me a no-brainer. I have said multiple times in a given survey "eliminate reclining seats!"

Dude, you spilled my mai tai!

Many other travelers are of a similar opinion, yet the industry has not really addressed this fundamental issue. A recent Washington Post article called reclining seats the "touchiest subject in all airline travel." A quick Google search turned up numerous incidents of planes being rerouted due to passenger "altercations" involving the reclining seat. Best headline I found, "Woman Chokes Man for Reclining Seat." Note that I do not advocate such violence!



My favorite story comes from 2014 when a passenger used a commercially available product, called the Knee Defender, which impeded the passenger in front of him from cranking his seat back. Ha! Airlines responded by banning the device. To recall Ross Perot -- "you're not listenin'!" And I would add "so why are you even asking?"

Seat blockers are better for your health than beta blockers!

The basic metrics of your airline seat are the width; the "pitch," which is the distance between the back of the seat in front of you to the back of your seat before it is reclined; and the "recline," which is how much reclining the seat adds to your pitch, and taketh away from the person behind you. Over the past 20 or so years, the average seat width has decreased from a little over 18" to 17", while I am sure the average beam of American passengers has steadily increased. The pitch has decreased from 35" to about 30". The average recline has not changed much, at about 5-6". All in the effort to add revenue by adding seats. These losses are significant in this game of inches. Think of adding 5 inches of free space in front of your face...or about losing it. If you don't recline your seat in response to the person in front of you, you lose 20% of an already very small amount of space.

For reference, the 30-ish inch pitch in your economy seat compares to about 60" in business class, and 80" in first class.

So ask yourself this question, when you recline your seat does it really make your air travel experience much better, in your 17" seat? How many "utils" would you give it (in economics-speak)? And the corresponding question, how many negative utils would you give having a seat reclined into you? To me, almost all other annoyances pale in comparison. The guy that puts his cowboy hat in the overhead bin on a full flight? There's actually a chance the flight attendants will step in. The person who decides it's a good idea to bring tuna salad in a Tupperware for an in-flight snack? Crank up the overhead air vent. The people playing videos on their phone without a headphone...well, that is pretty bad, too, so it ranks pretty high on the annoyance scale. The person in front of you who needs to stretch so puts their hands over the back of their seat and nearly hits you? Personally, I slap any hands that come over the top. The person who insists on bringing their small dog or worse, cat onto the plane, and then expects you to think it is adorable? I would be ok putting the pet in its carrier in the seat and putting that person in the hold with the luggage.

A malevolent dust bunny

I am not a tall person, so I can't imagine being 6' 4" and having to deal with this (...and also having to always see the top of the refrigerator, with all the accumulated dust, etc. which would trigger my OCD to start looking for the Windex and a paper towel.) Being un-tall has its benefits. But I digress.

Could this become a plank in the platform of a political party? Bernie pointing with his right hand and saying "Decline the recline!" It would get my attention. Maybe I will write to Boeing suggesting that they could possibly recover from the current bad press by finally addressing this injustice...?

2020 January

Barber Shops - A Vanishing American Tradition

From Mark's Curmudgeon Corner (a new blog sub-segment)

Somewhere around 1999, between jobs, I thought about applying for a grant to write a book about barbershops. My general idea was that with the advent of Supercuts and the like, another American institution was going to go the way of the Passenger pigeon. Or very soon, the vaquita in Mexico. Hopefully not our democracy (ok, it’s a republic), though Agent Orange told a group of teenagers recently that the Constitution, Article 2 says he “can do anything I want."

Barbershops held a high place in my growing up years in Oklahoma City. One barbershop, that is - Murray’s. Located at the corner of SW 44^th & Walker, kitty-corner from my elementary school, Lafayette, and next door to the tiny store where I sold the pop bottles I collected walking to and from baseball practice in the summer. I converted my loot into MAD magazines and bottles of Grapette soda. I had to hide MAD from my confiscatorial mom who thought MAD was evil. The bottle deposit was 2 cents (and went up to 2 for 5 cents when I was about 9!), and I am sure that looking for those bottles (thanks, you litterers!) is what inculcated me with the thrift store bug.

Murray was larger than life to me as a small kid. He had I think 2 chairs. They had razor strops on the side, which he used when someone got a shave. I do not recall anyone other than Murray cutting hair. There was the requisite stand with comic books and hunting and fishing magazines (no girly stuff as far as I know – it was Oklahoma!) Above it was a small black & white TV, which I remember as always having baseball games on – clearly not that accurate since that was only several months per year. And also, in the summer, a window unit air conditioner, straining away against the Oklahoma heat.

Mark as Jimmy Johnson

Each haircut brought sartorial apprehension. I always thought I would look bad after the haircut, versus today when I am happy just to no longer look like Jimmy Johnson, with a shrubbery atop me pate. 

And then there was the itchy hair down your back. I know I regularly complained about going to the barber – not because of Murray, an adult who treated even little kids with respect, but because it was just a little short of going to the dentist. Yet I remember it fondly.

After the rescue cut from Murray

So, the weekend before our 1^st grade pictures at Lafayette, I decided I could cut my own hair. I took a pair of scissors to my crewcut and got ‘er done. My mom came home, shrieked, dug in the closet for a baseball cap, and planted it firmly on my head. Good news – I was allowed to NOT go to church that Sunday! Woo hoo! This never happened unless you had been run through with a red hot poker or had some dread disease (a cold did not count).

Barbershops were generally closed on Mondays, but my mom called Murray and he came in and basically shaved my head, the only way to rectify my handiwork. Later that day, the school photo was taken, memorializing in perpetuity my self-shearing.

Mark (and his hair!) 2nd from left with brothers Bruce & Dan flanking

Fast way forward. When I was in my senior year at Oklahoma, I decided to let my hair grow. I was working at a hippie health food bakery, and no one even noticed, except my dad. He was extremely not happy about it and stopped helping me pay for school my last year. 

Eventually the need to get a real job and use my degree meant getting a haircut again. By now my hair was down to the middle of my back, a luxuriant mane. The nice lady (I went to a salon, not a barbershop this time) kindly braided my ponytail and cut it off in one fell swoop. It lived in that state for nearly a decade, sitting on a bookshelf, until I lost it in the war (my personal euphemism for losing things in a divorce, I hope that is not offensive to people who know what real war is.) I should add that when I showed up in class post-haircut, my students (I was teaching College Algebra at OU) booed me. Sigh.

Somewhere about 1997 I went into a real barbershop in San Leandro, California, on my way to work one day. It was a classic tiny 1960s strip mall thing, next to a donut shop. I had never been in this one, though I tried most of the ones I could find in San Leandro. I chatted with the man who cut my hair, told him I was working in Hawaii selling coffee, and he started telling me stories of his time in the military in Hawaii during WW2. In particular, he had more than one tale about getting into beefs with local mokes because soldiers had money to spend and local girls liked that… and the mokes did not. He also told me he was in the shop that day because he was helping his buddy, the owner, who had family in town and was taking the day off.

When the haircut was done, the barber handed me a green plastic comb, imprinted with “Happy Birthday from Bud.” I thanked, him, though it was not my birthday. I went back a few weeks later and the owner did not know who this "Bud" was I was talking about. Cheeken skin! (that’s Hawaiian pidgin for goose flesh). I came up with a few explanations but am sticking with my favorite – an encounter with a spirit barber. I use the same “Bud” comb every day now, for good luck.

When we moved to Oakland also 1997, we had a neighbor, John Cerrone, a true curmudgeon, and funny as hell. I am guessing he is 80 by now. He often walked his dog by the house, a pug, and proved the maxim that people often look like their dogs. He grew up in Boston, he still has a very heavy Boston accent, which he uses to full effect talking about his old friends, people with names like Johnnie and Rocko, who you don’t mess with. I used to see if I could overwhelm him with homemade Bolognese, or homemade cannolis for Christmas. It was a ton of fun. What has this to do with barbers?

John "Carmen" Cerrone, inspiration for Shampoo??

John was a hair stylist in San Francisco starting in the late 1960s, his trade name was Carmen, his customers were famous. He is the person who convinced Joan Baez to cut her hair short (and then did it). He “hosted the likes of Sassoon and Paul Mitchell,” who took his ideas. He was also devastatingly handsome back in the day. He had me scan some of his pictures from then…I showed them to some of the other neighbors, who were speechless (reference walking the pug, above). He sent me a video of him giving Robert Duval a baldy way back when. Life is better than fiction if you pay attention.

So – how does all this have anything to do with our travel blog? (Cue Holy Grail: “He’s going to tell! He’s going to tell!) 

Living in Mexico on and off now for 2 years, I have had many haircuts in local shops where my not-so-great-yet Spanish makes me wonder what I will get. I have landed on a local place, Joe’s Barber Shop in Ajijic. I first saw the name on a float they were sponsoring in a desfile for Guadalupe through town. As I told son James when he and Mattie were visiting, you have not had a real haircut until you have a Mexican haircut.

Why? To start with, no one is in a hurry. They use scissors as well as clippers. They use a straight razor to trim up all the sides and such. I usually get the corte y barba, which means I get a beard trim and shave (with hot towels). Yes, here in dangerous Mexico, I expose my throat to a young Mexican man with a straight razor. I should also say, look at the young Mexican men and the care many of them take with their coifs. And after an hour, it costs 130 pesos (80 for pelo only) plus tip. Deal of the week. 

(Note: current exchange rate is 19 pesos per USD)

From Joe's facebook page...EN SERIO!!

Once again – Viva México (and barbers!)

2019 agosto