Thoughts In Grey

The birthday boy's ice cream

"Nobody,"
He whimpered,
"Could call me
A fussy man;
I only want
A little bit
Of butter for
My bread!"

- The King's Breakfast
A.A. Milne

It's my birthday, and all I want is a chocolate ice cream cone.

Not one of those crazy huge waffle things where a ball of ice cream sits inside and almost requires a spoon to get at. Nor do I want anything filled with some kind of newfangled frozen dessert that is so empty you can't even call it frozen yogurt. I just want a classic crunchy cone with a big ball of that frozen concoction made of chocolate, butterfat and heavy cream perched precariously on top. The kind of thing that's almost guaranteed to destroy my t-shirt. Like it should.

Ice cream cones aren't the most popular thing anymore. Between the packaged, processed "ice cream treats" at the convenience store, all manner of frozen yogurt in god-awful flavors, soft-serve from a machine, airy gelato, custom mixed ice creams with all sorts of other junk in them, and everything else we now have, they can be really hard to get. The only place around here that still serves them up to you at all is the local Ben and Jerry's store in Santa Monica.

So I walked up Main Street, thinking my birthday delight was waiting for me. I was wrong.

Ben and Jerry no longer have chocolate. I don't eat ice cream often so not sure exactly when in the past 3 months or so this happened. They have half a dozen flavors with chocolate in them, but the good old all-American chocolate ice cream that our forefathers died to defend? It is no more. It has been -- to quote the counterperson -- "upgraded." Yes, she actually said that. It's now "Chocolate Therapy." Upgraded!

Chocolate Therapy looks like it would be fun  if you're in to that kind of thing. Chocolate ice cream with all sorts of chocolaty bits mixed in. But I'm not really into that kind of thing and certainly not when served in a cone. The point is to slowly lick it, let it melt in your mouth and flow down your throat. Lots of chocolate cookie chunks and other gunk get in the way. Good chocolate ice cream -- like a good steak -- can stand on its own and doesn't need any help. I just wanted my ice cream in a cheap crispy all-American cone. One of those simple pleasures that I've always taken for granted. Like butter on the king's bread.

As a kid, I always thought "The King's Breakfast" was kind of sad. I remember asking my grandmother why they had to put the king through so much trouble just to give him something so simple? Was there a reason to leave him depressed in bed? I felt sorry for the guy. I still do.

Today I know what it feels like to be the king.

Somewhere in LA there must be a place that serves good old fashioned premium chocolate ice cream with nothing mixed in, in a good old fashioned cone the way I like it. It must be there, but I'm too tired to look for one or to drive around getting to it.

When dinner is done I'm going to go out to the local premium supermarket, where they carry the really, really good ice creams. I'm going to buy a pint of the darkest richest chocolate I can find, the cost be damned. I'll buy a package of cones. Then I'll come home, make myself a double-scoop cone, wrap it in a napkin the way I did before they started gluing paper wrappers to them and go for a walk I'll probably stain my t-shirt. 

The people walking by may wonder, "why the hell is this guy in his 40s is walking around late in the evening carrying an ice cream cone on his way down to the beach?" Let them wonder. They'll never know what they're missing.

Brief Notes

Was a nice 4th of July. While my "date" for the fireworks party flaked, I had fun anyway.

• Ben Bernake is responsible for more than half of the currency currently in circulation. Yup, after 234 years of U.S. history, more than half the dollars in circulation were created in the past decade.
• And worth noting that serial criminal Casey Serin has spent yet another independence day still at large.
• Is this a sign of the end of prohibition? When governments start considering that taxing something is preferable to spending money on banning it, we're likely at an endgame. Considering that about 20% of the accumulated Federal deficit is related to the 40-year "war on drugs" and that the "war" has absolutely nothing to show for itself, maybe that's a good thing?
• Not that I'm in favor of drug use. Never used the stuff and don't plan on changing my stance anytime soon, but historically such bans -- whether on alcohol or anything else -- have never been anything other than a gift to organized criminals who are happy to step in and supply the market. We've shown that we know how to reduce smoking and drinking in much cheaper ways, so why insist on continuing down failed path of dealing with drug abuse through criminalization rather than trying something that has a history of working?
• Not that the morons at the L.A. County Commission don't have anything better to do. Like maybe deal with the broken county hospitals, the overcrowded jails (mostly overcrowded with low-level drug offenders), and the perpetually broken budget?
• On the other hand, the never-ending war on drugs is certainly good for a few laughs now and then, courtesy of the dumbest criminals.
• I tweeted this outrage from the Federal Reserve a few days ago but didn't comment on it here, as it sort of speaks for itself. As usual, Barry gets the last word.
• "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful" - George Box
• Andy Grove hits things right on the head, as he always did during the few opportunities I had to meet him during my short years at Intel (NasdaqGS: INTC). Industries are like ecosystems. You can't outsource the dirty pieces that we think somebody else should do cheaper and still expect to hang on to the "good" pieces. In the end the "high value" work tends to be a lot easier to do when you're right down the street from the factory or the call center or any of the other places where the rubber meets the road.
• Andy also is willing to break some taboo and remind us of times when things got bad enough that troops had to be called in to keep the peace. He doesn't remind us (but somebody should!) that one of the more common depression-era crimes was kidnapping and that violence against the well-off tends to increase when people decide they have no better options. I think a lot of people at the upper end of society are fooling themselves about how the current state of affairs will affect them.
• From my Facebook wall: "Facebook thinks I should become a fan of Barack Obama and Fox News, apparently because my real-world friends include a guy who had a show on Fox Business, and a former campaigner for Obama, among others. And isn't it grand that on this 4th of July weekend, I can still be friends with both of them and many others, and put the political BS aside."
• And for the record, I am not a "fan" of any politician or large corporation. When they pay me and/or bail me out to the tune of billions of dollars, I'll consider it.
• But please do hit the button above and become a fan of this blog! I can't pay, but I'll be really, really, really grateful.