Kinky Sauce and Tungsten
I’m sipping a Trappist Tripel in the evening gloom of the weekend’s Nor’easter. The sun is setting behind the clouds and the room is growing dark. The table lamp by my side doesn’t illuminate much, but I find the warm glow of red-hot tungsten soothing.
You can still find tungsten bulbs if you look for them. They’re sold as novelty “Edison bulbs”. Sometimes “Edison bulbs” are LEDs made to look like old-fashioned bulbs. That’s not the same thing. You want tungsten.1 I haven’t come across any over 60 watts, but few lamps are rated much over 25 watts these days.
I was supposed to have family over to visit today. We wound up rescheduling, because while the rain isn’t coming down very hard, there has been a lot of flooding—and I have a leaky skylight putting the drip on things. On the upside, my place is nearly spotless,2 since I spent the last couple of days cleaning (as one does when expecting company).
I have a big pot of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove: hand-crumbled Italian sausage, genuine San Marzano tomatoes (or so the can tells me) squished by mine own hand, an entire head of garlic, Parmesan cheese (aged 24 months), lots of olive oil, herbs, etc. I have high hopes for it. Regrettably, by the time it’s done, it will be too close to bedtime for me to enjoy anything more than a taste or two without suffering indigestion.3 Well, maybe three tastes. Definitely no more than four little tastes!
I’m listening to The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies on CD, which is possibly my favorite album of theirs. It’s a close contest between Muswell Hillbillies and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. I will listen to Village Green next.4
I prefer music on CD and vinyl.5 I have hearing damage and tinnitus, so I couldn’t say if either format sounds better than streaming, but there is something about holding a thing that makes it more real than subscribing to it. And listening to entire records from beginning to end is a different experience from infinite shuffling. This is particularly true of albums by The Kinks.
Footnotes
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Tungsten lights are better and infrared is good for you. It’s particularly good for your eyes. I would link to an article or paper discussing it, but I spent several hours this weekend cleaning up dead links from this website and citing my sources isn’t worth the overhead of link rot. ↩
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Let’s leave the office door closed for now. It’s chaos in there. ↩
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Sauce is done. It’s good. It’ll probably be amazing tomorrow after a night in the fridge. ↩
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I’m well into Village Green by now. I’d say the best songs on Village Green beat out the best songs on Muswell, but Muswell wins as an album. ↩
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I also kind of miss cassette tapes. I wonder if I’d even still notice the hiss over the perpetual ringing. ↩