My fig crop, episode V

Our fig tree is outdoing itself this year. We are picking pounds of figs every day, many of them right from the deck because the tree has grown so tall.

Which leads to the inevitable issue of what to do with all of these figs, other than just eating them by the bowlful. 

 

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Pizza math

Do you want the best deal when you're buying pizza? Simple math says always get the biggest pie. Dr. Ho's Humble Pie is the best pizza in the C-ville area (unless you want real Neapolitan style from Lampo, but Lampo's pies are one size fits all, so they won't work for this exercise anyway), so we'll use Dr. Ho's to do the math.

 

The formula for calculating the area of a circle is, fittingly, 𝜋r². Setting aside the 10-inch "gluten friendly" pies, Dr. Ho's offers its specialty pizzas in two sizes: 14 inches for $22.75, and 16 inches for $24.75. The area of a 14-inch pizza is about 154 square inches. The area of a 16-inch pizza is about 201 square inches. That's about 30% more pizza for 8.8% more money.* Just those two extra inches get you way more cheesy delicious goodness for your buck. If you don't want to eat it all, split it with a friend; who doesn't love pizza?

 

And what about the gluten friendly pies? The area of a 10-inch pizza is about 79 square inches. A 10-inch specialty pizza goes for $17.50. So even compared to a lower value 14-inch pie, you're getting about half the pizza for about three-quarters of the price. Compared to a 16-inch pie, you're getting about 39% of the pizza for about 71% of the price! The GF penalty rears its ugly head.

 

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*Feel free to check my math. I never would have made it through my intro stats class at Hopkins without your mother.

 

Photo by Chad Montano on Unsplash

  

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Conversation starters, Mom style

After a recent dinner, Brad complained that our conversations are always the same, that is, boring ("How's work?"; bad political news, etc.). There are plenty of conversation starters available on the internet, so I clipped some out and stuck them in a jar on our table for when the need arises.

 

The ultimate conversation starters are the 36 deep questions developed by social psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues. Their now famous paper is titled "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings." But the method they developed to generate "interpersonal closeness" is better known as the "fast friends" procedure. An article in the New York Times "Modern Love" series ("To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This") that went viral in 2015 described how the author and a "university acquaintance" fell in love going through the 36 questions together.

My 2024 reading

A favorite year-end activity is looking through the books I read in the preceding year. According to StoryGraph, I read 73 books in 2024, totaling 21,622 pages. The genre I spent the most time with in 2024 was, not surprisingly, psychology (20 titles), followed by memoir (15), self-help (11), and "literary" (9), whatever that means. Looking through the picture of all the books I read last year, I see that there were a fair number I slogged through, even though they weren't all that enjoyable. 

The beauty of boredom

Some people dislike being bored so much that they'd rather give themselves an electric shock than be bored. At least that's what UVA psychologist Timothy Wilson and his colleagues found in a series of experiments they did about a decade ago ("Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind" (2014)). During the experiments, participants were asked to sit alone in a plain room with no cell phone, reading materials, or writing implements and entertain themselves for 15 minutes with nothing but their thoughts. But in one of the studies the participants had the option of giving themselves an electric shock during the thinking period by pressing a button. Of the 18 men in that study, 12 gave themselves at least one shock, while 6 of the 24 women did. (Which is why women should be running the world, though that wasn't part of the study.) Professor Wilson and his colleagues wrote that it was striking that "simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier [told investigators] they would pay to avoid." The authors thus concluded that "[m]ost people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative." 

 

Of course, nowadays no one ever has to be doing nothing because everyone constantly has a smartphone at hand to ward off boredom by doomscrolling, watching videos, playing video games, listening to podcasts, etc. But is that a good thing? Other books (e.g., The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good (2017) by Sandi Mann) and studies (e.g., "Why Being Bored Might Not Be a Bad Thing After All" (2019)) say definitely not. The benefits of boredom including sparking creativity and the mental respite just from stepping away from stressful work emails and social media long enough to get bored. The former is particularly interesting, as Mann explains that boredom is actually "a search for neural stimulation that isn't satisfied. If we can't find that, our mind will create it," which could lead to creative ideas you wouldn't get if you reached for your phone instead of letting yourself get bored for a few minutes. So go ahead and be bored once in a while and see what happens.

 

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Poor old mr. iceberg lettuce

In their classic The Person and the Situation, Professors Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett delve deep into one of the most famous concepts in all of social psychology: the "fundamental attribution error," which they define as "[p]eople's inflated belief in the importance of personality traits and dispositions, together with their failure to recognize the importance of situational factors in affecting behavior." In other words, we have a cognitive bias to believe that other people act in accordance with their personality traits (what "kind" of person they are) rather than being influenced by social and environmental forces outside of their control. Notably, this only applies to other people, as we all tend to recognize that our own behavior is dependent on the situation and thereby give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.

For example, if someone cuts me off on the highway, then I think that person is a jerk and/or a bad and aggressive driver, whereas if I "accidentally" cut someone off, it's because I've had a bad day and am distracted or in a hurry to meet someone at the hospital. Or I snap at someone and they attribute it to me being generally thoughtless and rude, while I know it's because I was worried about something and got a bad night's sleep. The lesson is not to assume that someone has acted, or will act, in a certain way because that's "just how they are."

 

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Toothbutter

I learned a great new word recently: tandsmør, which translates literally from the Danish as “toothbutter” (tand = tooth, smør = butter). The Danes use it to describe butter that it is spread so thickly on a slice of bread as to reveal teeth marks when bitten. If you've ever eaten a meal with Grandma and Pop-pop with bread and butter present, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

 

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The good life, part I: date night

One of my top candidates for best read of the year is The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (2023) by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. The book is a summary of all the lessons that the authors have drawn from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which started in 1939. Incredibly, the lessons all boil down to one overarching principle, well summarized in this passage from the book:

[I]f we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period. So if you’re going to make that one choice, that single decision that could best ensure your own health and happiness, science tells us that your choice should be to cultivate warm relationships. Of all kinds.

The book goes through the evidence and suggests some ways to foster your relationships "of all kinds," including intimate partnerships, family, and friendships.

 

With regard to the first category, it's easy to get into a rut, so I loved their idea to "[p]lan a weekly date night and take turns choosing what you will do (and maybe surprise your partner with a new activity if a surprise would be welcome)."* Mom and I implemented that suggestion last month, and it's been really fun planning things to do with each other. This morning, we got out for a long walk around downtown and then down Main Street to UVA and back to take in all of the Fall colors.

 

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*Research from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia shows that "couples who devote time specifically to one another at least once a week are markedly more likely to enjoy high-quality relationships and lower divorce rates, compared to couples who do not devote much couple time to one another." W. Bradford Wilcox & Jeffrey Dew, "The Date Night Opportunity: What Does Couple Time Tell Us About the Potential Value of Date Nights?" (2012).

 

 

 

 

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Panzanella

Panzanella is something I used to make frequently, before gluten became a bad word. Mom made two loaves of sourdough (still waiting on her guest post) to bring to the beach, and one of them was definitely past its best, so I looked up this version of the dish and made it as a side. GF Mom liked it so much she made it again with the rest of the leftover loaf. You can't beat a dish that reminds you of both the beach and Tuscany.

 

Fast food, episode XIV

On the list of fast foods, I don't think there's anything faster than couscous. You really can pull together an entire meal (or prep lunch for most of the week) in about 15 minutes. And a tasty and healthy meal at that (if you don't fear the gluten). 

 

Note: recipe authors love to put raisins in their couscous dishes, maybe because they plump up so invitingly when exposed to the moist heat. But if raisins remind you more of small turds than an edible substance, don't let that stop you from making this delicious couscous salad; just substitute another dried fruit, like chopped dates or sweetened cranberries, or leave it out entirely.

Worshipping Santo Pasticciotto

Our Italy trip featured many highlights. For our one full day in Rome, we went on an epic 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) walk, starting at our hotel and heading straight to Vatican City.

TV is literally shrinking your brain

One of the few benefits of having attended the Johns Hopkins University[1] is getting the quarterly alumni magazine,[2] which usually has a few interesting articles. In the latest issue (Winter 2021), there was a short piece about a study conducted by Ryan Dougherty, a postdoctoral fellow in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Relying on 20 years of data, the study concluded that "[a]mong middle-aged adults, greater television viewing in early to mid-adulthood was associated with lower gray matter volume." In other words, watching TV literally shrinks your brain. By about .5%, as it turns out.

 

The details: Every five years, participants in the longitudinal CARDIA study conducted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute reported, among other things, the average number of hours of television they had watched on a daily basis during the preceding year. The daily average was 2.5 hours. Those participants who viewed at least an additional 1.4 hours of TV a day[3] showed a half percent reduction in gray matter on an MRI scan performed at age 50. Interestingly, this held true even among people who watched that much TV everyday but who were also above average in the amount of physical exercise they were getting. This suggested to Dougherty that "just becoming more physically active alone is not going to negate the negative effects associated with television viewing."

 

Does it make a difference what kind of programming you're watching? The CARDIA study didn't have information on that, but Dougherty hypothesizes that "documentaries might be less brain-shrinking than reality TV or other fluff." So, no hard data but I'm pretty sure Jeopardy! is way better than The Bachelor.[4] Or just put down the remote altogether and do other activities, such as crossword puzzles[5] or juggling, which other studies have shown may preserve or even add gray matter.

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[1] The biggest one being having met your mother there, as if you had to ask.

[2] Which is cleverly titled Johns Hopkins Magazine.

[3] If you don't feel like doing the math, that's a total of 3.9 or more hours a day, which is a lot of fucking TV.

[4] I'm also sticking to my guns that watching soccer games doesn't really count as viewing television.

[5] See if you can work up to a Saturday Stumper in Newsday.

 

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Crystallized intelligence favors the old

By a happy coincidence, soon after reading Mindwise and posting the episode musing on whether the decrepitude that sets in with age is less physiology than self-fulfilling prophecy, I read an article ("Starting Fresh" or, if you read it online, "Is It Really Too Late to Learn New Skills?") on lifelong learning by Margaret Talbot in the January 18, 2021 issue of The New Yorker. Talbot discusses three relatively new books, all of which I've added to my ever-expanding library wish list: Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning (2021) by Tom Vanderbilt; Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (2018) by Nell Painter; and Late Bloomers: The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace (2019) by Rich Karlgaard.

 

Talbot discusses the original meaning of the word "dilettante," which was one who admires an art or science (like music or psychology!) casually and for amusement, rather than professionally. It is derived from the Italian word dilettare "to delight," from the Latin delectare "to allure, delight, charm, please." How delightful! In the late 18th century, however, "dilettante" took on the more pejorative meaning of a "superficial and affected dabbler," basically a privileged person with too much time on their hands. But, Talbot says, "if you think of dilettantism as an endorsement of learning for learning’s sake—not for remuneration or career advancement but merely because it delights the mind—what’s not to love?" As someone whose first and third signature strengths are "appreciation of beauty of excellence" and "love of learning," I couldn't agree more.

 

The problem, of course, is the idea that you can't teach an old guy new tricks. It may be true, as Talbot writes, that fluid intelligence, "which encompasses the capacity to suss out novel challenges and think on one's feet, favors the young." But crystalized intelligence—"the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise, and Fingerspitzengefühl—is often enriched by advancing age." [1] Talbot also refers to a 2015 paper ("When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak") showing that cognitive abilities rise and fall asynchronously across the lifespan. For example, while crucial Jeopardy! skills like processing speed and short-term memory for names peak in the late teens and twenty-two, respectively, vocabulary doesn't peak until fifty or even later, and "social understanding, including the ability to recognize and interpret other people’s emotions, rises at around forty and tends to remain high." Talbot concludes that it is the "gift of crystallized intelligence" that explains why "some people can bloom spectacularly when they're older," including E. Annie Proulx, who published her first novel when she was fifty-six [2] and one of my favorite novels, The Shipping News, two years after that.

For his part, Vanderbilt decided that he had time to learn some new skills while he was waiting for his young daughter to make her round of "lessons and activities" (sounds familiar). Beginners chronicles his effort to achieve competence in chess, singing, surfing, drawing, juggling, and "making" (he apparently learned to weld a wedding ring to replace the two he lost learning to surf). Most of that looks sorta doable, and I can already play chess and juggle (two balls with one hand and three balls with two hands, anyway), but what really caught my eye was singing. Who knows, maybe Cassie's right and it really isn't too late for me to learn how to play the cello?!

 

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[1] Fingerspitzengefühl is a German term, literally meaning "finger tips feeling." Wikipedia defines it as "intuitive flair or instinct," describing a "great situational awareness, and the ability to respond most appropriately and tactfully." While nothing may ever displace callipygian as my favorite word,
Fingerspitzengefühl is a pretty darn good word (even if it is German).

 

[2] Fifty-six! Good grief, I'm running out of time to publish my first book.

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The request hour, episode VII

Upon urging Dylan to try the Celery Salad with Almonds, Dates, and Parmesan (which I told him is "one of my favorite dishes ever"), I was surprised to discover that Dylan "loves" celery. Dylan told me that he sometimes ups the celery ratio in the mirepoix because he likes the flavor to come through. Dylan also said that he likes celery in tuna salad, which reminded him to put in a request for an easy tuna salad recipe. You know I love a good request!

Coincidentally, I had just discovered Alison Roman's A Newletter through a New Yorker article about Substack ("Is Substack the Media Future We Want?"). The author described Roman's newsletter as containing "recipes and breezy, bossy, self-deprecating anecdotes," which sounded entertaining so I started exploring. It's $5 per month for full access, but many of the issues are available for free, including the first one, which had this recipe for a good-looking tuna salad.

 

Cleaning-out-the-fridge recipes, part II

Posting two recipes in a row for similar celery salads might be the kind of thing that would lose a blogger his (very) small handful of regular readers ... but then you'd try this recipe and be (extra) grateful for said blogger. After making the Celery and Parmesan Salad twice, I just happened to read an article on the Bon Appétit website called “The Keepers: The Recipes We Cook Over, and Over, and Over Again.” Among the 19 recipes collected there was another one for a celery salad, with a separate appreciation by Carla Lalli Music (former Bon Appétit food director) with the eye-catching title “This Celery Salad Is Actually Amazing and Yes, the Main Ingredient Is Celery.”

 

And so I had to try this one too, and yes, it is most definitely amazing. Not only did Mom—having now overcome her deep-seated skepticism of celery as the main ingredient in anything—and I both pronounce it "heavenly," but I'll go so far as to say that this is one of the best salads of any kind I've ever tasted. Depending on what items you plan to keep in your pantry, both celery salads are worth having in your repertoire, but this is the one that will really impress your dinner guests—when you have dinner guests again.

Celery Salad with Almonds, Dates, and Parmesan

Adapted from Joshua McFadden from Bon Appétit (Sept. 2013) and Six Seasons (2017)

Time: 23 minutes

The leaves are a nice part of this salad, so buy a whole head of celery, rather than pre-trimmed celery hearts. If you get a very stringy bunch of celery, you can peel off the fibrous outer layer with a vegetable peeler. In Six Seasons, McFadden includes the extra step of soaking the celery slices in a bowl of ice water for about 20 minutes to “heighten the crispness,” then draining and patting them dry before proceeding with the recipe. But I think celery is already plenty crisp without this step, which wasn’t included when the recipe was originally published in Bon Appétit, so I skipped it.

65 grams (½ cup) raw almonds
8 celery stalks, with the tender leaves (see note)

6 soft Medjool dates, pitted and coarsely chopped or snipped
45 grams (3 tablespoons) freshly squeezed lemon juice
¼ teaspoon dried chile flakes, or to taste (you can use regular crushed red pepper flakes or something like Aleppo or Marash for less heat and more flavor)
Diamond Crystal kosher salt
freshly ground black pepper
55 grams/2 ounces Parmesan cheese, shaved with a vegetable peeler
53 grams (¼ cup) good extra-virgin olive oil

    1. Place a rack in the center of the oven; heat to 325 degrees. Place the almonds on a small sheet pan (a 9-by-6½-inch eighth sheet pan is perfect). Toast the almonds, shaking the pan once or twice, until they are fragrant and a shade or two darker, about 10 minutes; watch carefully. Transfer the almonds to a plate to cool, then chop them coarsely.
    2. Meanwhile, clean and trim the celery, separating the leaves and reserving. Slice the stalks on a sharp (more than 45-degree) angle into ¼-inch-thick pieces. Transfer to a large bowl with the celery leaves.
    3. Add the almonds, dates, lemon juice, and chile flakes, and toss with the celery. Season generously with salt and pepper. Add the Parmesan shavings and oil, and toss gently. Taste and adjust the seasoning; you’re aiming for a perfect balance of salty, tart, and sweet. Serves 4 to 6 as a side.

Dylan’s comments: This is “definitely a keeper,” but double or triple (!) the chile flakes and use a teaspoon or two (5 to 10 grams) less lemon juice 

Cleaning-out-the-fridge recipes, part I

I don't expect this recipe to generate any more page views than the glazed carrot recipe I just posted, but it's worth having in your repertoire because it solves a problem that's been bugging me for a while. You buy a whole bunch of celery to make one of your favorite UaKS recipes like Lentil Stew, Gigli with Lentils, or Dried Cherry Chutney, but you only need one stalk. Then the rest of the bag sits unused in the crisper drawer in your refrigerator for a while,* until it finally goes bad and ends up in your compost bin. Well, not anymore. This recipe uses up all the rest of that celery. Mom was dubious of anything with celery as the star ingredient, but even she agreed that this dish is not just practical but really tasty too. Leave it to the Italians to solve my food problem. (In the Barefoot Contessa video accompanying the recipe I adapted below, Ina says that "Italians really love celery, and they use it much more than we do." Who knew?)

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* Celery will keep for up to a few weeks in the fridge, especially if you take it out of the plastic bag you probably bought it in and wrap it in foil instead before storing it in the crisper drawer.

Celery and Parmesan Salad

Adapted from Ina Garten via the Food Network (with Barefoot Contessa video)

Time: 20 minutes total active, plus 1 hour or more in the fridge

 

Celery is obviously pretty bland on its own, so the genius of this recipe is pepping up the flavor with, among other things, umami from two sources: Parmesan and anchovy paste. Having said that, you can skip the anchovy paste or come up with an acceptable substitute. The original recipe makes a ton of dressing, so I halved it. If you're not a fan of vinegar (you know who you are), this would also make a good dressing for a regular side salad. If you get a very stringy bunch of celery, you can peel off the fibrous outer layer with a vegetable peeler.

12 celery stalks, yielding ~5 cups sliced (see note)

Diamond Crystal kosher salt

45 grams (3 tablespoons) freshly squeezed lemon juice, divided

1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
53 grams (¼ cup) good extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon minced shallot
½ teaspoon celery seed
¼ teaspoon anchovy paste, optional (see note)
freshly ground black pepper
a block of Parmesan cheese
65 grams (⅔ cup) toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped
a palmful of Italian flat-leaf parsley leaves, coarsely chopped

    1. Clean and trim the celery, separating the leaves from the stalks and reserving. Slice the stalks thinly on a sharp angle (bias). Place the celery slices and leaves in a large mixing bowl. Toss with ½ teaspoon kosher salt and 1 tablespoon (15 grams) of the lemon juice.
    2. In a small bowl, whisk together the remaining 2 tablespoons (30 grams) lemon juice, lemon zest, olive oil, shallot, celery seed, anchovy paste, ¼ teaspoon kosher salt, and a few good grinds of pepper. Stir the dressing into the celery. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
    3. When ready to serve, transfer the celery to a platter, leaving some of the dressing in the bowl. Taste for seasoning. Using a vegetable peeler, shave thick strips of Parmesan over the celery. Sprinkle with the walnuts and parsley and a grind of pepper. Spoon the remaining dressing over the top. Serves 4 to 6.

More voyages with porch pirates

Ahoy dear readers, I'm afraid my reputation precedes me, like a mighty leviathan trying to outrun the sting of the harpoon in the briney deep. My hearty Ed continues to feed my obsession by forwarding me every article he stumbles across on the scourge of porch piracy, and I continue to take the bait. But how could I resist such choice morsels as these?

 

The first article ("Americans lost $5.4 billion in stolen packages this year, survey finds") reports that half of the booty lost to porch piracy—$2.7 billion this year—was swindled from millennials and another $1.6 billion from GenXers, while baby boomers lost a mere $700 million. No doubt the buccaneers have realized the profit in stealing all of the North Face, Land's End, and similar merch you and all of your millennial and GenX peers are buying. If you go to the article, you will note that this freebooter was at least thoughtful and/or smart enough to wear a face covering while hornswaggling the loot—no sense giving or getting COVID-19 along with your not-so-hard-won bounty.

Alas, pirate smarts were sorely lacking from the bilge-sucking scallywag discussed in the second article ("Alleged porch pirate arrested after wearing exact same shirt to court from surveillance footage"). This line from the article says it all: "An accused porch pirate has been arrested after wearing the exact same shirt the very next day to a South Carolina courtroom that he had worn to steal packages from peoples’ porches" the day before. Not only that, but you can see from the photo that it was a North Face shirt he was wearing both days, which is prima facie evidence that he's a serial offender, having almost certainly swiped the shirt from some poor millennial on a previous voyage. So mark my words and keep up your guard against this ever-expanding menace. Savvy?

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Food bloggers, am I right?

I recently stumbled across a blog post by someone who writes about food and some other things about how the person made her first $500 blogging. The key was that she got on with a successful ad network company once she met its minimum requirement of 30,000 page views a month. (To put that into perspective, I've had less than 25,000 page views total since I started this here blog 60 months ago.) Thanks to the increased ad revenue, her blog is now, she says, a "six figure business" netting enough to support her family, including her six children and her husband who quit his job so that they could do the "blogging gig" together full time.

After that, I took note of another post by a different food blogger who says that she also makes a "full time income" from her blog, which "feeds [her] family" that includes her husband and four kids. She mentioned that people complain about the annoying ads, but opined that putting up with the ads is a small price to pay for free access to the recipes she works hard on. Fair enough, but I have to say some of the ads are a wee bit counterproductive to the purpose of a food blog. For example, this is a portion of an actual screen grab from right at the start of one of the second blogger's recipes:

 

Yum-o! I don't know about you, but nothing makes me want to try a recipe more than a picture of an open toilet and an IBS quiz. [1] It could be a good thing for the blogger, I guess, in that if you get the shits from eating her cake that's made with 3 cups of sugar (not including the 2½ to 4 additional cups of sugar for the cream cheese frosting), she can say it's IBS or sucrose intolerance rather than the cake. Plus, you have to hand it to the ad firm for knowing enough to use a picture of a shiny new john instead of one that somebody crapped in after eating the sugar bomb.

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[1] Yes, I know the ads are supposed to be targeted to the user so that, presumably, not everyone would see this particular ad. But trust me, if someone thinks I need to take the IBS quiz, either their algorithm needs some serious work or there is a major dose of randomness involved in the ad-generation process.

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Weeding out the stinkers

In addition to reading cooking magazines through the RBdigital app, I also have a backlog of print magazines from Dylan's bounty that I couldn't keep up with. I've been plowing through those lately, too, and let me tell you there is a lot more chaff than wheat in most cooking mags. I'm lucky to find one or at most two recipes I'd even consider trying from any one issue. I was just looking through the final issue (December 2019) of Rachael Ray Every Day magazine in that form and came across probably the worst "recipe" I've ever seen. The gist of it is that you tear canned biscuit dough into pieces, coat them in a stick of melted butter, and then bake them with a quarter pound of crumbled blue cheese. Yum-o! doesn't that sound dee-lish?

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Big beautiful things

We've been getting all sorts of interesting mail since I had Grandpa Guy's mail forwarded here. I've certainly found out a lot about the turn the Republican Party has taken in the last three years. In addition to the wacko pleas for money running down Obama and the Clintons (still!), among others (I see you, Nancy Pelosi and AOC), we also get all sorts of stuff promising an improved sex life.

The brochure for Oyster+ capsules takes the cake, though, with some truly outstanding testimonials. For example, Marie & Jean-Claude D., from Paris, France (Jean-Claude van Damme, that's not you, is it?), have been having "one orgasm after another," and even "made love 6 hours straight, which never happened before, even when we were younger" (despite being French). Giovanni P., from Milan, Italy, "rarely experienced my penis getting so big!" (despite being Italian!) and "made love for almost a solid week without stopping!" (you gotta take a pasta break once in a while to fuel up). And it's not just the Europeans who've benefited from this miracle product. The partner of Rocco C. from San Francisco, California, started calling him "The Lovemaking Machine!" because he can now "make love as long as I want." Most pertinent for us old folks, 83-year-old Sid W. from New York, New York, can now "make love up to 3 times a day" with his wife (age unknown, but probably not so thrilled about that development). Finally, Harvey M. from Las Vegas, Nevada, can make love "for hours with the greatest pleasure," thanks to his new-and-improved erection that is "bigger and more beautiful than ever!"

Although ... come to think of it, that doesn't sound all that much different from the Republican propaganda we've been receiving. I wonder if Harvey M. has ever fantasized about building a "big beautiful wall" along the Mexican border?

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