It stands to reason that more than a few people are all a’gloat over the now-confirmed news that Paula Deen has Type Two diabetes, because significantly more than a few people are outright assholes. Deen won’t say ‘fuck the haters’ – not out loud, for sure – so you may consider that I, a fellow Type Two diabetic, just said it for her.

(This news does put the launch of her son Bobby’s show, Not My Mama’s Meals, in a bit of context that was missing before. Hey, it’s a business, ya’ll.)

As for butter, which I consider my close personal friend: To borrow a riff from Mitt Romney, margarine is the biggest fraud since Bigfoot. I expect Paula to continue folding the real deal into her recipes – with some moderation, to be sure – because a life of deprivation is hardly worth the trouble.

You may recall that last April, M and I had the old decaying support pillars of our century-old home replaced with steel columns. Here are the retired wooden pillars:

M instructed me to make sure that the contractors who installed the new columns left the old pillars with us. She had something arty in mind; I had no idea what, exactly, but have learned to rely on her judgment in such matters. So the old columns sat in the basement for a while, and were relocated to the back yard after that.

Months passed (envision pages of a calendar flying, just like in the movies), and we moved on to other house renovation projects. The new kitchen took shape, and M eyed the walls of that room. She described what she wanted to do: mount the pillars on a wall or two (or three) as accent pieces. To that end, M used a sander to remove the paint from the pillars, and then used the table saw to first cut away the old decayed ends, and then to cut the pillars into sections. She experimented with stains on a couple of the sections, but ultimately decided that the natural distress of the wood looked much better.

And then, with some minimal assistance from her husband, M mounted the post sections on the kitchen walls. Like this:

Closer view here:

And here:

My wife never fails to amaze me.

This post constitutes a warning – not to any particular person or institution, but to the world at large.

Give me a hard time, mess with me in any way, and I’ll pull up stakes and move to a spot within driving distance of this unnamed beach on Oahu.

Think I’m kidding? Try me.

“For many people Black Friday shopping is now as much a part of the holiday tradition as the turkey,” the Target spokeswoman said. “Black Friday has an exciting, euphoric feeling.” Uh-huh.

As a DISH Network subscriber, I’ve been treated lately to repeated trailers for the pay per view presentation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part the Second and Final, At Long Freakin’ Last, Can You Believe It? No need for PPV for me, as I’ve seen the flick twice in theatres and will doubtless purchase it on disc at the opportune moment. The trailers do bring certain enjoyable scenes back to mind, however, chief among those being two moments centering on Lord Voldemort. It’s an axiom that clashes between good and evil require memorable villains, and the portrayal of Voldemort by Ralph Fiennes certainly qualifies. Indeed – and though I am certainly no film critic – I’d go so far as to say that two He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named moments are so drop-dead awesome that they fairly demand a Best Supporting Actor award for Fiennes:

1: A priceless reaction of barely suppressed rage when Neville Longbottom dares to ask to say a few words as Voldemort revels in apparent victory. Fiennes’ villain pauses for just a moment – one grimacing, teeth-gnashing moment. You can practically read the thoughts flashing across his countenance: How…how DARE this little cretin intrude on my moment of supreme triumph! I should kill him for this! I…I WANT to kill him…but it would be bad form, wouldn’t it? Delightful.

2: The response when it appears that Harry Potter has not answered the summons to his doom at Voldemort’s hand in the Forbidden Forest. Voldemort despises Potter for simply existing, of course, and has never seemed to truly acknowledge the link between the two of them (as Potter does), and yet takes it on faith that this foolish, noble boy will answer the call to sacrifice himself. Fiennes waits; he turns, then looks back to stare into the woods; he murmurs, as though speaking to himself rather than to the sycophants who surround him:

I thought he would come.

Voldemort sounds, in this moment, not just confused but genuinely disappointed in Harry. It’s an oddly human moment, and it’s brilliant.

Yes, yes, I know that there are those would prefer that Best Supporting Actor be awarded to Alan Rickman for his admirable portrayal of Severus Snape, and I am loath to oppose them. Still, I think I’ll hold out for Fiennes, who certainly deserves it. Let’s end with a quote from Fiennes himself, as he describes his take on Voldemort:

He’s all about acquiring power and controlling and manipulating a lot of people. It can be thrilling and quite freeing to play, because all the rules disappear. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, director Mike Newell encouraged a switchblade explosion of venom and rage. When somebody is contained and has the ability to explode, that makes people nervous.

When I was young, there was this character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang called the Child Catcher. I remember being terrified by this figure. I think children should be really scared of Lord Voldemort.

Sometimes kids would come to the set, and I could see them looking at me anxiously. I once walked past the young child of a script supervisor, and he burst into tears. I felt very good about myself.

Well played, sir.

Was recently wandering with M through our favorite antique/resale store, Treasure Aisles, when I ran across this volume. My heart leapt in response, for On Cooking: Techniques from Expert Chefs came to me as if in answer to a deficit in my culinary approach: I don’t know enough about how to cook. It’s one thing to robotically follow recipes, which I do on a regular basis; it’s another thing altogether to understand the principles of cooking, the how and why of the process (as opposed to the what).

So, yeah, we’re giving this textbook a try. It is a pre-owned copy of the third edition (the title is currently at the fifth edition), which is fine by me. I’ll let you know how my culinary studies go.

Behold: the mighty spud!

The spud is the part of a cast iron radiator which connects one side of the radiator to the valve (where hot water or steam enters) and the other side to a union joint (where water/steam exits). A deceptively unassuming piece of hardware, the might of the spud lies in its ability to resist efforts to remove it when it has been connected to the radiator for ten thousand years, as many before me have learned. And as I know now!

For every piece of hardware, there is a tool for working with it, or so we are taught. The recommended tool for removal of a spud is called a spud wrench:

The shape of the spud wrench is designed to fit against the two metal ‘buds’ inside of the spud. You then clamp a sturdy pipe wrench to the spud wrench and torque it mightily to loosen and unscrew the spud. Well, that’s what I’ve heard. But what if a spud wrench is as rare as hen’s teeth in your area? I searched high and low at various hardware stores, big and small, for this tool, only to be met with blank stares or the wrong kind of spud wrench altogether (intended for sink and toilet work) or the news that ‘we just sold out.’ Oy.

This is no impediment to the creative and embittered homeowner, though. Time to make shift with the tools on hand. Insert the handle of a smallish pipe wrench (twelve inches, say) into the spud:

Attach a larger pipe wrench to the smaller one:

Now wrench it! But with steady applied force; no jerky violence, please.

This is how I removed the balky spud from one radiator, and I was terribly pleased with myself. That is, I was pleased until I tried to repeat the procedure on the two spuds on a second radiator. This failed, for the buds inside these two spuds were so corroded that they simply snapped off, causing the handle of the twelve-inch wrench to spin impotently in place. Anger…rising…

So what does one do in this spot? One relies on previous unfortunate experience. Earlier, I had goofily turned the nut of one spud in the wrong direction while trying to disconnect the spud from a radiator valve; I cranked the nut away from the radiator and towards the valve. What happened is that I broke the nut, basically; I would up wrenching it off the spud altogether and onto the valve. That was an accident – but I realized that I could perhaps use the same procedure to either remove the nuts from the spuds on this last radiator – in which case I could apply a pipe wrench directly to the outside of the spud – or the spud itself might finally loosen as I cranked the nut and valve away from the radiator. So I took an old, unattached valve, spun the nut onto it, and then held it in place as I deliberately spun the nut in the wrong direction (towards the valve and away from the spud).

And goddamn if that didn’t work. On both spuds. I was able to spin them off (with some elbow grease).

The first success might have been mere happenstance, or shithouse luck, as they say. The second success raised this approach to the level of recommended procedure, and I am happy to share it with you.

For a look at the way normal people remove valves and spuds from cast iron radiators, I recommend this terribly helpful post by Josh at Bungalow Twenty-Three.

“While many conservative leaders have voiced their support for Herman Cain, his abrupt shift from blaming the news media and the liberal left to suggesting that one of his rivals was plotting against him could cause a new divide in the Republican Party.” Waiting for Cain’s apology to liberals, heh.

To commemorate the first full-featured blog post I have written in many an age, I have chosen tuxedo cat Baxter as my topic. Of the felines who allow M and I to serve them, Baxter is first among equals. Indeed, as the image below indicates, he is truly Top Cat:

Stylin’! And appropriate, because Baxter is indeed the gray and white eminence of our little cat kingdom. He is very much a status quo kitty and likes everything to be just so. He shares this trait with another benevolent dictator, the legendary Fat Controller of the railway lines on the mythical island of Sodor in the Thomas the Tank Engine stories, one Sir Topham Hatt. Both cat and Hatt hold order and usefulness to be the highest qualities, and both abjure confusion and delay. In chaotic household situations (which occur often, sadly), it is common for M or I to observe that “Sir Topham Catt was cross.”

So, yes, we think of Baxter as being our own Sir Topham Catt, feline controller. He doesn’t seem to mind.