Oh, Sunny Saturday...

Wow, just wow - you know the northeast is envious of Texas weather today.

• To that point, a long-long-ago FG (can I borrow that term, CK?) texted me this morning with pics of her driveway, somewhere in Ohio, the undisturbed snow on either side at least 2' deep.
• While doing some chores around the house, was listening to KXT and heard the Indigo Girls' Galileo, which I had not heard in forever.  As I listened, I remembered that the harmony background vocals were Jackson Browne and David Crosby's.
• Normally, I'm not affected by caffeine, and have long maintained that I could drink 2 cups of coffee at a late evening event and still fall asleep five minutes from my head hitting the pillow.  So, it's made it difficult for me to empathize with insomniacs.  
• But lately, my locust or cicadian rhythms have gotten off track - like maybe their tympanies are out of tune or something. Despite going to be around midnight last night, I did not reach any restful sleep until after 5:00a, just fits and starts of maybe 5-10 minutes.  I blame it on the smart phone, though I did have my second cup of coffee around 9:00p.
• Speaking of REM - sort of - hearing Galileo send me to my dusty trove of CDs.  I put on the 'Girls eponymous CD from 1989, which happens to feature Peter Buck and Michael Stipe.
• When others bashed Jay Leno, I was usually a defender.  Even though he was widely criticized as not being the worthy successor to Johnny, I thought that he managed to capture the middle-America ethos of his predecessor better than the Indiana-raised Letterman, who I believed relied too heavily on 'inside baseball' banter with Paul Shaffer.
• Anyway, while I would still enjoy watching his cars bits, I think he acted the a$$ in dissing former Miami Heat cheerleader and Bachelorette Trista Sutter, née Rehn, as being an airhead.  Look, if you're getting, or got, millions to fake interview people on your show, it's probably poor form to insult your guests, even years after the fact. 
• Maybe I'm also partial, inasmuch as she actually married the 'bachelor' Ryan despite the whole contrived nature of the show, and is apparently still married, which in today's world strikes me as something of an accomplishment.
• Leno also lost standing in my eyes when he backed out of performing for this year's SHOT Show, the gun show for manufacturers, distributors and retailers, when he 'learned' that it was associated with guns.  For real?
• I attended a couple of SHOT shows in the '90s, when they were held at the Dallas Convention Center.  Since then, they migrated to Orlando, which has a huge CC, possibly with a stop at NOLA, but have now apparently become permanently attached to LVNV.
• I probably wouldn't recognize one today.  Used to enjoy being able to pick up and caress handle a $50,000 Italian shotgun, or a fine British double rifle, but apparently the 'black rifle' segment now dominates the scene.  Not hatin' here, but it's not my main area of interest.
• It was all the more enjoyable that the component bullet manufacturers: Nosler, Hornady, Sierra, Speer, Barnes, etc, had huge bins of 'sample' component projectiles that you could scoop up by the handfuls and dump into your swag bag.  Same for gun lube makers, featuring small packets (think soy sauce packs) of whatever space age super non-gumming zero frictionizing snake oil that could turn your Davis or Jennings pot metal heater into a Walther, Sig, or Kimber.  Or at least so it seemed. 
• If I win the lottery tonight, I will indulge my inner - wait, who am I kidding? - eccentric, and buy one of these:

Homely, yet in this livery, somehow dignified.

Or maybe this one:

Embracing my abstemious eccentric - ya only got 

one driver, why do you need two headlights?

But not quite this eccentric: 

Formerly owned by Dr. Severinsen?

• I made a pot of chili earlier this week.  Now, some of you will say that I did not, in fact, make any chili at all, as I used diced chicken (it had been in the freezer and I needed to use it before it started getting 'freezer burn'), and - gasp! - beans (not solamente 'chili' beans, pero también frijoles negros).  If I were entering an ICS competition, and with all due respect to Terlingua (Viva, Jerry J!), you would of course be correct.
• But this chili weren't built to win no award other than approval from the singular gastronome el Donaldo.  And in that it succeeded, featuring roasted poblano & bell peppers, tomatoes, and cebolla roja, lean ground turkey, with the camp cook's proprietary (and never the same twice) secret blend of  'round about twelve herbs and spices (allegedly including comino, sage, cayenne/black/white pepper, paprika...sorry, I can't reveal more or it wouldn't be secret anymore, now would it?).
• On the subject of chili, some wrench turner named Carroll Shelby said: "It's what you want when you make it. You can put in anything you feel like at the time...make it one way one time, another time, a little different.  Make it up to suit your mood."  Also, a couple of guys, Wm. Albert Gebhardt of New Braunfels, and Lyman T. Davis (who had a pet wolf named Kaiser Bill) of Corsicana, had respective brands making and selling chili - some of it con frijoles - some threescore and more years before a couple of Dallas (!) newspaper scribblers¹ decided that  beans weren't no part of the recipe.
• There, I feel better now.

¹ Don't worry, pards, I'm smilin' when I'm sayin' that...