Friday Mosh Mish

 So, what's up?

My buddy Jeff in Fairbanks sent this beautiful picture. He didn't take it, a friend did. Alaska is on my bucket list.

And speaking of buckets how long before a certain Senator kicks his? You think there is a betting pool with an over and under out there? I want in.

Mitch has been fairly decent the last year or two regarding the Orange regime but I will never forgive his Merrick Garland perfidy and lies.

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My buddy Mick is in the Sierras with his son. Caught a nice trout yesterday.

I saw blast reader Valerie at the nail salon yesterday. 

It was time for the farrier to trim my hooves. No color.

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Leslie found racks of lamb at Sprouts for $4.99 a rack. She bought seven of them at that price. The Super Shopper.

This is super cheap, I  have seen them for $35.00.

Yesterday she soaked a rack in a cumin soy lemon marinade all day and I cooked it up on the trusty Weber last night.

Three minutes a side direct heat and then about twenty minutes to 125° on indirect. I parboiled Yukon potatoes that I had tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper and rosemary for fifteen minutes and stuck them on a grill pan next to the lamb on the indirect side. 

I have never done them in the charcoal Weber like this. Leslie caused a near explosion hitting the fire with duck fat spray. But it all worked out beautifully.

Just have to watch the potatoes and keep turning them.

Really good!  Make sure you don't overcook, you have to find the magic pink zone.

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What else?

I ran into an aging Superman at the swap meet the other day.  Sad when they go to seed. But let's face it, who hasn't? Takes a lot of commitment to get the eponymous tattoo, even for a superhero. Wouldn't be racing any locomotives at his age, I will tell you that.

Sad to hear that my old swap meet pal David Lido had perished in a car wreck recently. Great guy.

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I love that Premier Xi brought up Thucydides yesterday with President Trump.  I am sure he lost him on the first syllable. Thu - what?

Interestingly, the Thucydides trap was first conceived by the author Herman Wouk at the Naval War college.

The expression was inspired by the ancient Athenian historian and military commander Thucydides (died c. 400 BCE), used first in a speech by Herman Wouk in 1980, and then revived by the American political scientist Graham Allison around 2011. Wouk described the trap as a precedent for the 20th-century Cold War:

You remember that Athens and Sparta were the two great adversaries, the 'superpowers' of the Greek world; that they had allied themselves to fight off and defeat a common enemy, Persia; and that after the victory their alliance fell apart in a cold war.

Wouk lamented the recurrence of superpower rivalry, particularly in the nuclear age, but concluded that he found hope in two sources. First, he pointed backward in time from Thucydides to the Biblical age, and specifically to Isaiah's prophecy:

And they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up its sword against nation, nor will they learn war anymore.

Good luck with that. 

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Let's hear it for the Padres, they just clinched a playoff berth for the third straight year. 

They have the best record and have been playing the best baseball in either league for the last half of the season after a horrid start.

Not how you start, it is how you finish and everybody is getting hot at the right time.

Cubs lost the first game of a doubleheader in Boston today. Padres might be hosting the wild card series with a couple more timely wins and losses.

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I was driving to work this morning when I found myself behind a dark full sized truck making the left on Brandon.

It was a red light but the truck didn't care, crossed right in front of two oncoming vehicles, right through the red.

I had two immediate thoughts, either a deranged patient or employee at the Fallbrook Hospital or a cop?

After the green I saw the truck pull in behind the Sheriff's office, through the employee gate. 

Bingo.

Because we all know that to law enforcement there's two types of people, cops and criminals and they think that the rules that apply to the rest of us do not apply to them.