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Praetorium Honoris

Friday, March 17, 2023

Brame Frammage

 Hey, guess what?  It's Spring! So my head is splitting from severe sinus pressure and I've been snarling at Mrs. Andrew, Kegan the wundermup, passing animals and just, er, everything.

Seriously painful.  Sinuses swell, put pressure on frontal lobe, frontal lobe controls personality, personality goes all Mr. Hyde.  Usually I realize it before it gets bad and I can take my anti-Hulk pills (Vitamin I, ibuprophen) before I destroy too many bridges and wreck too many relationships.

Um, not today. 

I think it was about the third time Mrs. Andrew used The Voice to tell me to go try asexual reproduction or sexual self-reproduction or something along those lines while Kegan was curled up on her and not me that I realized I had become Hulk-Smash Hyde.  So instead of relief in 30 minutes or so, it's going to be a couple hours before snarly surly HSH is under control. Until then I'll just hide from the world, wich is kind of hard to do when you live in basically a trumped up studio apartment and your major piece of furniture where you live on is the bed you share with, uh, Mrs. Andrew and Kegan the wunderdog.

Back when I had the house, don't think I could escape, because being out of touch/out of reach of Mrs. Andrew was not a doable thing for a lot of reasons, mostly because she needed to make sure I didn't do anything too stupid to myself, like trying to use sugar and chocolate to control my mood, and, yes, I have eaten 3lbs of peanut M&Ms before in a depressive funk that was epic only in the amount of said candies consumed but everything else about that episode was just stupid and best left alone in the past. Unfortunately the guilt center of my brain keeps periodically cycling through all the guilt episodes so short of accidentally getting hit by lightning or having rebar pass through a portion of my brain or some other traumatic brain injury event, that memory will continue to surface.

Gloom, depression and sinus pressure.  

Wanna know what makes it all so extra special?  The smell of incipient sinus infection that comes from having sinuses filled to 3 times the approved pressure with sinus fluid thanks to trees and bushes and other green growing things having wild passionate vegetative sex all over the area, especially on my car and right where I want to walk.

Gah.

So instead of witty repartee regarding other bodily issues like the time I passed out for three daysish after almost dying and other neat moments in my life, I get to regale you with Tales of Snot.

So we'll leave that at that and go into some music or something.

Growing up in occifer country on military bases in the 60's, well, guess who was very popular amongst said occifer class occifers?  If you said, "Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass," you'd be correct.

I could tell my dad was happy when strains of HAatTB came out of the occifer-class required really nice Japanese high fidelity stereo system (usually smuggled/carried lovingly from duty-free stations or on overseas flights as extra cargo from Okinawa or Japan itself) at volumes to be heard on the back porch while he and his occifer-mates were grilling on those big ceramic Japanese hibachis (probably secured the same way as the stereo pieces,) you know, the ones that once they get hot they get fragile so basically when you move you leave it for the next occifer or you move in and one's been left from the previous occifer and rumors abound about ceramic hibachis that have 'lived' at one quarters for 5-6 rounds of occifers moving in and out and in and out.  Seriously, growing up in the 60's on AFBs you would see said Japanese ceramic hibachis.  Kind of the predecessor of the Big Green Egg bbq grill. The reason they work so well is that once the very heavy ceramic shell is heated, it retains that heat for a looong time so you can cook evenly using a small amount of heat-making fuel.  As said before, actual period Japanese ceramic cookers were fragile once heated once, so in Japan and on Air Force Bases there was a cult of ceramic egg cooker users (and some that could, around 95% of the time could move the cookers by one house, maybe.)

Like this, except Made in Japan, 
not Made in America by Big Green Egg
A must have for certain levels of officers on AFBs back in the 60's

So HAatTB.

The Lonely Bull - Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
one of my Dad's favorites
and mine.


Spanish Flea - Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
another one of my Dad's and my favorites


Back when I had the lonely staff ass job at the outpost from hell working for the city of losers' police department, I would and did regularly blast Tijuana Brass' works at volume because I was all alone in a big building all alone.  Other groups that were blasted out loud will follow in the future or I have already talked about.  No clowns, no post-modern jukebox, all old school CD stuff (weird being able to call compact discs 'old school.')



32 comments:

  1. My parents had a Herb Alpert album with the girl covered in whipped cream and a white blanket (to give the impression it was all cream) on the cover. Boy that sure got my pubescent hormones raging.

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    1. Um, that and the album cover for Apollo 100's "Joy" album. Can neither confirm or deny same with the Sears catalog if you know what I mean.

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  2. Saline nasal flushing works for me. Walmart for about 4 dollars las time I bought a throw away kit.

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    1. I use saline washes when the nose works. On days like this, there's no air exchange through nasal passages because it's Snot River Express. So things like saline washes, Flonase, nasal canula and nasal CPAPP masks don't work. Yay me.

      Been doing this all my life. First time I realized I could breathe through my nose was when I was 7 and in the Kwajalein family pool, which was filled with fresh salt water from the larger Pacific Ocean just a few hundred feet away. Giant saline wash pool. Very excellent, also not being around normal US pollen helped, too.

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    2. Be careful about those nasal flushes because death from amoeba via nasal flush has been happening for a few years now!

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    3. Yup. Florida is home base to killer brain-eating amoeba. Any relatively still body of water here has them. Which is why I love highly clorinated water.

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  3. Yah Beans, that Whipped Creme & Other Delights album was in the album rack at home along with a couple of others including that greatest hits one.

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    1. Good music. Amazing that popular music could be made without referencing parts of the human anatomy or calling women 'garden tools' or every third word being a curse word.

      I, unlike my dad, do not do a Mexican Gaucho holler during the good parts. Quite a character he was.

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  4. Beans, one annoying fact I have found as I grown older is my propensity to sinus infections - and not the one or two ones, but the week to two week ones. No idea why something like that developed later in life.

    This is sort of music that reminds of the happy sort 60's, before things turned a different corner.

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    1. Probably because of 2 things, you have developed allergies that did not show up as a young'un and there are now blockages and such from skin tags, polyps and other things that restrict air and snot flow.

      Yep. Happy happy music. Just fun things to listen to. Which is why listening to Post Modern Jukebox is so good, they take goodish modern music and play and sing it so it sounds much better.

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  5. My sister in law gave me some stuff she made a few weeks ago when my sinuses were starting to fill up and pressurize the pot.

    4 cups water, 1/2 cup elderberries, 3 cloves garlic, 3 star anise, 5 sticks cinnamon, some ginger (I used about an inch, chopped up) simmer for 30 minutes, strain hot into 1 1/2 cup honey. Take a couple teaspoons every day. It turned my snot locker inside out. Pressure went down that day, and snot started to move. Next day, I filled up a handkerchief after waking up. I'd never had them dump like that.

    I love the Tijuana Brass. Everything was right with the world when they were on the radio.

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    1. Problem is, past a certain point, there's no getting things in there. So best solution until I can get air movement is stand in the shower blasting my face with as hot water (and corresponding steam) as possible for as long as possible. Which gets the sinus slugs moving at a faster pace, which gives me about a minute to actually get saline water or other things up there to encourage the slugs to giddyup and go.

      I have to be careful with biologicals as once the allergies caused by biologicals start, additional biologicals can cause further damage. Fer instance, carrots a-okay during regular times. During sinus times, carrots are definitely not a-okay and can cause throat-closing swellings of the mucus membranes. Yay me.

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  6. When I hear "hibachi" I think of those small cast iron grills that we had in Hawaii, I remember my Dad burning chicken on one on Kailua beach back in 62 or so.
    I was down at medical (CGAS Port Angeles, WA) one morning for something, in a different room was a guy with a sinuse problem. He was in pain, you could hear him. I don't know what they did but all of a sudden I heard a high pitched whine of escaping air and a sigh of relief.
    Good luck!

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    1. Plenty of those cursed metal ones, but the pride and joy were the big ceramic cookers. Dunno what they were callled but hibachi is basically Japanese for grill, so...

      They used a vacuum. Which sometimes works, but gotta be careful not to suck too hard.

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  7. Crusty Old TV Tech here. Sinus can be a real problem, yep. Not suffering like you Beans, but constant running nose with the oak pollen here in Clutch City.

    On the TJB, my father used to blast TJB from his mono 1940's Jensen 12" woofer studio monitor speaker and 30 watt Altec amp (with Garrard turntable, and Eico preamp!). Made the dishes in the kitchen rattle, made Mom rather testy. She'd yell at him to "TURN THAT STUFF DOWN!". Good memories of my father and TJB.

    Side note, I was directed in elementary school to draw a picture of my father, and I drew him playing a TJB record. Teacher was not impressed. I'm better at schematic diagrams than real art.

    He kept that picture for years.

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    1. I was cursed with bad jeans, I mean bad genes. On the other hand, if the genes follow correctly, I'll be in my mid 90's and fat and die from something stupid like catching a cold or slipping on ice or a third bout of leukemia or something.

      Cool on your picture, boo on your teacher, cool on your dad. Ah, the post WWII era of high fidelity. Kids these days just don't understand.

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  8. By the time I joined up (1975), all of the enlisted folk on Okinawa had the big Japanese stereos. No hibachis though.

    Herb Alpert, oh yes, parents were big fans when I was a kid, so was I. Great music.

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    1. Sure, the enlisted may have had those stereos, but since Dad was an officer, we lived in officer country, so no frame of reference to the enlisted life for me. Well, one. You could always tell when someone, enlisted or officer, was moving back stateside because suddenly there would be duplicates of various expensive pieces of gear for to take back home. And nobody threw away the boxes the stuff came in, as the every 2-3 year movement meant having to box and unbox and box and unbox.

      It wasn't until later that I found out that in the civilian world people didn't keep boxes like the people in the military world did. Weird. And it was painful to have to break the box-hoarding part of that. How did you handle it once you settled down?

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    2. Had a metric crap ton of boxes in the shed after our last move. Once we'd settled in at Chez Sarge there was a certain impetus to getting rid of said boxes. Me, being a creature of habit, resisted for quite some time. Then a guy from work needed boxes as he was moving from one house to another. So ...

      I let the boxes go. It was somehow sad, yet liberating. No more moves for me. House is paid for, why move? (We'll see what happens when we get really old.)

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    3. Interesting (steeples fingers...) Moving via military life vs civilian life (well, based on what I know of the moves we made in the 60's, that is) there was definitely a cultural difference. Now? Dunno. Don't care to think about it. Maybe LUSH or The Nuke or others of your extended clan can provide info on modern military moves.

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  9. I didn't break the box-hoarding habit. SWMBO never had it and attacks boxes with knives. I have finally given her enough box cutters that she doesn't use my cooking knives! (Looking back, I think she's moved seven(?) times in her life, so she's had little practice in moving; I moved more than that before entering high school.)

    TJB. Those three letters, just by themselves, start the band in my mind.

    Sorry about your nose. I get that blackage from ragweed, and none of the modern (or old) things work on it. Travel away from it to avoid more exposure, and suffer for a week.

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    1. Grew up saving boxes. It was just a thing. Got room for broken down boxes? Save boxes until box space is filled. That type of thing. Very hard to break the addiction. Now, being in an apartment with a dumpster, boxes must go. Eject all extraneous materials. Go away, demons of clutter and such.

      Nose is far better now living where I am than when I was growing up, which was the edge of subtropical so lots and lots of blooming plants year round. That was a major issue. The breaking line is basically the I-4 corridor in Florida, and then west of Orlando. North of that and nose is only subject to horrid seasonal allergies, south of that and horrid allergies year round. Eh. It's what makes me, me.

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  10. We were at Webb AFB, Big Spring Tx at that time. I don't recall a hibachi at all (Dad was a Flight Commander, so he hosted lots of parties and I baby sat at a lot of Lt/Junior Capt homes). I do recall that the big BBQ dream there seemed to be 55 gallon Oil drums cut basically in half and supports for a grill grate welded in. But, then again, Webb was at the end of the world, so who knew what civilization had.
    But, as I said, I did a lot of babysitting ($.50 per hour, it was not unusual to make $3.00 on any given Friday. Lord, I've never been that rich since.) and every Lt/Capt's house had a stereo and TJB albums. Loved 'em. Still do.
    Thanks for the memory refresh.

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  11. My first wife worked for a dermatologist, he said that you can develop new allergies any time. Something to look forward to! :-(

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    1. You can even develop allergies from getting blood transfusions. Something that most doctors won't acknowledge, but it's true.

      Wife used to be able to, pre-blood transfusions, walk through poison oak and ivy with no issues. After, highly reactive. Same with peanuts and other food allergies.

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  12. Talking about clogged Sinuses here and half an hour later I saw this short, https://youtu.be/mlOZUPwE5z4 ... funny how the world works!

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  13. Whipped Cream and Other Delights.
    Sears and JC Penney catalogs....
    memories.

    I used to spend every Memorial Day weekend holed up in a room with a window mount AC and a bottle of antihistamine. The last few years the allergies haven't been bad.

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  14. All true! All true, I say, regarding the Kamado Cooker. This, from an old occifer from Itazuke AB, Japan. 1962-1964.

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    1. Horray, someone who actually knows what the damned things were. I seem to remember there was quite the smuggling ring around them and stereo components on MAC flights from Japan to the USA.

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  15. Beans- Well done, and you deserve a medal for your making a successful and interesting post while suffering from sinus problems.
    I get a lot of them, relatively minor compared to yours, I don't think I could type a recognizable word,let alone sentences or paragraphs.
    Well done, sir. A model of commitment and work ethic despite being surrounded by your entitled and pampered Gator neighbors.
    JB

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    1. Ha. You can still hear all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the UF campus because the Governor appointed a semi-conservative as UF President. HAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAA.

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