Come Fly With Me

If you read the lyrics of the Sinatra classic, it is actually pretty racy for 1958. He is trying to entice some young thing to get on a plane with him and he is outlining all the exotic places where he plans to finesse her panties onto the hardwood. Who knew?

Good Morning!! Finally some rain! I have three threads to pull together for you this week, so please bear with me as I went a little long this week.

Thread One - Ford needs to fire his entire communications team. He has had two gigantic muffs in the last few months. Not because he had a bad idea, just a team with no concept about how to communicate a complex issue to garner buy-in from a fractious public. He needs a plane. Come on? The Ontario economy is larger than a lot of sovereign nations! You can take staff with you, have meetings in the air, fly when it is convenient or just have a frigging nap. How do you do all of that wedged into a business class seat? He should have: Formed a commision? Put some enemies on it. Publish the findings. Pitch it to the public? Put it in the a future budget? No one in their right mind is going to look at his schedule / responsibilities and say this is a luxury?
The same incompetence has now been demonstrated in the pitch for expansion of the Billy Bishop airport on Toronto Island. He does a big announcement. No list of allowable airplanes, no schedule, no business case and no drawings. He let the naysayers produce those. They show runways stretching to halfway to Kingston with 747's crashing into the Bluffers Park. Now the Feds have nixed it. Serves him right! Hold that thought?

Thread Two - The primary naysayer was No Jets T.O. A nimby (not in my backyard) start-up that used every dirty trick in the book. They lied. They produced hogwash artwork (because Ford let them). They produced bullshit survey data. You can't collect 87,000 signatures and say that it is a survey. Taking accurate surveys is a science. If you have a real survey and 75% of the respondents are men, then you throw out male opinions until you get their weighting the same as their percentage of the population. These days about 49% That gives you a real reflection of public opinion. An open survey does not gather that data. If some Birkenstock wearing communist with kale on her breath in Sudbury doesn't want the island airport expanded, who the fuck cares? For the record, almost every plane you see in the sky carrying paid passengers IS A JET. Every hear a turboprop engine start? IT'S A JET. In a jet engine, burning fuel at the back of the engine spin impellers which are on a shaft. That shaft run up to the front of the engine and spins impellers which suck in huge amounts of air, which is then heated and blown out the back. In a turboprop, that shaft run right out of the front the engine and spins a propeller (which pushes air out behind the airplace. They are both jets. They argue that jets are loud? The Airbus A-220, British Aerospace BAe146 or the or the Embraer E2 are all quieter than the Bombardier CJT's now flying daily out of Billy Bishop? So this is not a noise issue! Jet are faster. They are more fuel efficient. That's why airlines use them. Why would Olivia Chow be against that? There were 48 million fly out of Pearson last year. 2 million from the island. Instead of driving to the furthest reaches of Mississauga, if some percentage of those folks could walk, bike, bus, subway (take the tunnel one day?) and fly from where they live, wouldn't that be good for the environment? There are 32,000 parking spots at Pearson. That is the the entire population of Orillia. Every day! Driving to the airport? Driving home again. This is not rocket (or jet) science!

Thread Three - The CEO of No Jets Toronto did a big press conference on Tuesday. He said this issue is dead forever. He is not very smart. This issue makes infinite sense the other way. It is going to come back. The question is when, and I know the answer! There was a by-election announcement on Monday for three ridings in Canada. Look at the map in the header above and guess which Ontario ridging is going to have a brand new MP on August 31st? Yup. The Beaches - East York! Previously held by the Liberals, Nate Erskine-Smith and John Tory have taken turns stepping on each others' dicks. Now Tory has dropped out of the race and it is up for grabs. With a prevailing westerly wind, right down that shoreline those jet would go, if this proposal was given a green light? Of course, they wouldn't really. They would come in from the south, sight on the CN tower, make their final turn in the last two or three miles. You will need binoculars to see them from The Beaches. But that wasn't what folks were told and no one ever accused Mark Carney of being stupid? The feds have said NO for now but have agreed to study the issue further. I wonder what they might "discover" in the next year or so after that seat is safely back in the Liberal camp? Money bet? Five years? Anyone?

What's Cookin?

So, I had a buddy (PS) over and we doing some "test kitchen" work on Asian Noodle Bowl Salad. I had two dressings to try. One Vietnamese and one Korean. The first version came came out nuclear as we had two of those little red bastards in there. The second one was more savory. After a couple of adjustments (removing one and a half of the little red bastards for starters), we had our winner in an "enough for two" recipe size. I wanted to make a larger batch. Guess what else AI can do easily? I gave Gemini our ingredient adjustments from the original recipes that I found and told him I wanted to prepare a 16 ounce jar for the fridge. For the record, this is called bibum (which means stirred) and it is to die for ...

Ingredients

• 10 tbsp Gochujang (Korean chili paste) — approx. 2/3 cup
• 7.5 tbsp Rice vinegar — approx. 1/2 cup minus 1/2 tbsp
• 5 tbsp Soy sauce — approx. 1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp
• 5 tbsp Toasted sesame oil — approx. 1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp
• 5 tbsp Honey or brown sugar — approx. 1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp (I used Splenda Monk fruit Zero)
• 5 large cloves Garlic, finely minced (I added some grated ginger)
• 5 tsp Toasted sesame seeds (for garnish as well)

1. So, with no salt and no flavour packages, boil a baseball sized amount of any noodles until el dente. Take 30 seconds off the package directions after the water comes back to a boil. Taste a piece, make sure it is right! Rinse in ice cold water to stop the cooking process. Drain the crap out of it. Blow dry it if you have to.
2. Put a ¼ cup of cold bibum from the fridge in the bottom of a wide bowl.
3. Put a serving of your cold noodles on top.
4. Then arrange matchstick julienned veggies in neat piles around the edges. Whatever is in the fridge? You could eat a turd with this stuff on it!! Garnish with sesame seeds and a squeeze of lime juice. Of course, a piece of kimchi works as does a fried egg. When you dig into the noodles with your chopsticks (or your fork for the F150 crowd), it will pull just the right amount of savory goodness up through the veggies and into every bite! I used DeCecco whole wheat noodles (a story for another day) but the "rabbit hole" for this project was wise in the ways of the force ...

Bibum - from the Korean bibida which means stirred

Bibum Guksu means stirred noodle and is the most well know variant.
Thin wheat flour noodles and can include kimchi. Think Vietnam.

Bibum Naengmyeon - naeng means cold, myeon means noodles in Chinese. They use chewy buckwheat noodles and you could find some pickled radish and an fried egg on this version.

Jjolmyeon - We already know that myeon means noodle. The jjol is a little more obscure? There is a phrase in Korean jjolgit-jjolgit (pronounced joel geet ... twice) which simply mean chewy. So this is an abbreviation of that phrase that means chewy noodle. This is the first dressing (above) that we tried. It is more vinegar based and guaranteed to burn your booty hole.

Enough? I think so. Pretty rare to see this served in a by folks of my ethnic persuasion, but you should consider adding this to your repertoire. You can have the veggies prepped in the fridge alongside the bibum. Boil the noodles, plunge em in cold water, build a bowl? It's like an eight minute lunch and I will be eating this a lot. Drop by my patio, I'll make you one.

Our Optimum Week

Zehr's didn't want to induce me to shop their last week, so mostly I didn't. That is called shopping. You can buy, or not buy. The planets did align for us over at Shoppers. Their flyer had her milk (Neilson 2% microfiltered), her cream (Neilson 18%), her chips (Lay's Wavy Originals) and her cereal (Oatmeal Crisp Almond). Then I got a text special: Spend $60 for 20K in points! Here is what that little twelve minute shopping spree looked like:

Decision time for shopping this week? I don't have points right now, but Zehr's has a Bonus Redemption Event! Each 250,000 you redeem gets you $300 off the top of your grocery bill. If I had 750,000 points, every nook and cranny, fridge and freezer spot would be stuffed with $900 worth of free groceries. I splurged at the garden centers. I gave you points holders a larger list this week. Go wild:

What I'm Reading

Cachelot by Alan Dean Foster - In the vein of The Uplift War by David Brin, this is not quite as good but explores the concept of artificially raising the IQ of animals into sentience. In this case, marine mammals. If whales became philosophers, would they be pissed about almost being wiped out on earth 800 years earlier for lamp oil? You bet your ass they would. Great read.

We are Watching

That Dirty Black Bag on AMC - I see in the credits that Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) executive produced this and played a small part in the back story. He shows up in the strangest places? I guess he is investing his money wisely. Other than a nonsensical revolver hooked up to vein in someones arm, it's a fresh take on the cliche failing western town. Crooked sheriffs, scheming land developers, downtrodden farmers, it's checks all of the "been there, done that" boxes but is somehow fresh and different. It only got one season in 2022 but people are talking? I'm am really enjoying it. SWMBO not so much.

... and finally

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away
If you can use some exotic booze, there's a bar in far Bombay
Come on and fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

Come fly with me, let's float down to Peru
In llama land, there's a one man band
And he'll toot his horn for you
Come on fly with me, let's take off in the blue

Once I get you up there, where the air is rarefied
We'll just glide, starry-eyed
Once I get you up there, I'll be holding you so near
You may hear all angels cheer because we're together

Weather wise, it's such a lovely day
Just say the words and we'll beat the birds down to Acapulco Bay
It's perfect for a flying honeymoon, they say
Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

Pack up, let's fly away
And don't tell yo' mama

Mitch & Maddie

p.s. - Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie was an aristocratic mover and shaker in the late 1800's. Her second husband was a diplomat. She travelled the world, was buddies with Oscar Wilde and was fully bilingual. So much in fact, that a lot of her work was written in French including: Tout Vient A Qui Sait Attendre. The translation reads:

All things come to those who wait
I say these words to make me glad
But something answers soft and sad
They come, but often come too late

Her family was so scandalized that she was a writer, she wrote under the pen name Violet Fane. According to Mr. Google, she was NOT the inspiration for Lady Whistledown. I thought the "rabbit hole" spit up bunnies! Not so much ... m