the King of las Bromas de Fartos

If you’ll allow me a crude metaphor (as I’m sure you, the King of las Bromas de Fartos, will): a guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room. The guests get all excited, yell in protest. He takes a second dump. The guests feel, Well, yelling didn’t help. (While some of them applaud his audacity.) He takes a third dump, on the table, and still no one throws him out. At that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps. 

George Saunders (Love Letter)  

We should make it a habit to read the complete short story here or listen to the author reading it here. Every morning for a week.

Here's another bit from it:

Every night, as we sat across from each other, . . . , from the TV in the next room blared this litany of things that had never before happened, that we could never have imagined happening, that were now happening, and the only response from the TV pundits was a wry, satirical smugness that assumed, as we assumed, that those things could and would soon be undone and that all would return to normal—that some adult or adults would arrive, as they had always arrived in the past, to set things right. 

And then there's that, from a guy called Mike Monteiro:

Mostly, though, we’re sorry we gave up. It all seemed very hard. We let a lot of stuff go by. We were going to fix it all in the next election. Also, we read something on Reddit about how the best way to fix it was to let it all crash, and then rebuild, and there’s a certain logic to that. We didn’t think about all the people who’d get killed on the way to the collapse. So yeah, I think we might’ve fucked that up. Getting to tomorrow felt like more than we could handle. 

We watch the polls, in the last month we moved from every fifth to every fourth person wanting a fascist party in power in Germany. I sit in my favourite coffee place at the farmer's market and count, one, two, three, four. I wish my parents were alive, just for comparison.

I know I will not be able to just hang around watching and quoting disillusionment beautifully crafted by educated writers, I am working on it. We are grandparents.

In other news, here is a picture of some of the grape harvest, 16 kilo, ready for wine.

 

And last week, I finally figured out how to properly cook tofu thanks to my Japanese neighbour. She just laughed when I told her about cubing and marinating and the resulting somewhat tasteless rubbery consistency.

This is what she taught me.

First you press as much water as possible out of a block of firm tofu by wrapping it in paper towels and putting three to five heavy books on top of it - in Japan, you would use a snazzy tofu press - for at least 30 minutes. 

You prepare a marinade of choice while you wait. Following her suggestion, I mixed equal parts of almond butter (because there was no tahini in the house), soya sauce and apple vinegar, added a dash of lemon juice. 

Next, you tear the tofu into pieces, you do not cut it into cubes. And you totally ignore the marinade for now. Instead, you fry the torn unmarinated pieces of tofu in sesame oil until everything is nicely browned, the browner the better she said. Be patient, take your time. When everything is nicely brown, you turn off the heat and only then do you pour your marinade onto the fried brown torn tofu and toss the lot. If need be, you can sprinkle some roasted sesame seed on top. And then you eat it.