Why Does My Pesto No Longer Love me? A Culinary Call For Help.

This flu is unusually severe.  Get your vaccinations this year if you have not in the past.  Or get the flu and  feel like something that's drawn through the wood chipper, repeatedly.

I'm slowly creating an actual post in my head, in the few available tiny spaces between the giant snot deposits.  But in the meantime, I have a culinary question for you:

What makes pesto taste worse than Trump's ideas?

I have made pesto for years, from all kinds of nuts and all kinds of herbs.  Some combinations are tastier than others, but all of them have been acceptable.  Except recently.

Five times I have had to throw large amounts of pesto down the sewer because of an extremely strong metallic (or bitter) aftertaste it gives*.  Changing the olive oil has not helped, guaranteeing the freshness of the herbs and the nuts has not helped.

So I suspect the garlic.  I am bigoted toward recent garlic.  In the olden days it was easy to peel, but now it takes me hours to peel enough cloves.  And the cloves seem often to be miniature cloves inside something that initially looks like a normal-sized clove.

Is it the garlic?  Or something else?

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*  I first tried doctoring it with more cheese or more herbs and so on.  Nothing made it edible.  And it's not the cheese that's at fault, because after the first mishap I tasted the mixture before cheese was added.

And the taste is there.  I don't quite know if it is bitter or metallic or salty.  It's a little of all those things, but whatever it is, the message to my taste buds is negative. 

The Trump Show. What's Happening Behind the Curtain?

I know that I'm back in Murka when this is how Our Dear Leader behaves en route to the Flight 93 September 11 Memorial Service in Shanksville, PA:

Actual photo of Trump on his way to  the Flight 93 memorial service. pic.twitter.com/0lNUYXLwBZ

— JΞSŦΞR ✪ ΔCŦUΔL³³º¹ (@th3j35t3r) September 11, 2018

In a sinister way that is reassuring:  He hasn't developed any significant behavioral changes in the last few weeks.  He's still without any empathy or social intelligence...

And what are the wizards behind the curtain doing while we watch The Trump Show?

1.  Well, Betsy DeVos is fixing the problems in how colleges handle allegations of sexual misconduct:

I Am Back, Partly

From my traditional summer trip.  It's not a vacation, but, nevertheless, a change, and it usually refills my writing reservoirs. 

This time, however, I had a long layover during which I was allowed the enervating experience of watching someone hack and hork their lungs out.  I sent a few quick messages to mount Olympus, asking the other deities to make sure that this particular passenger would be sent off in some other plane, to some other reality.

But Zeus, that goat-fucker, intercepted the message, and because he hates my guts (me belonging to the half-monster-type deities* with sharp, divided tongues), he seated that particular consumptive patient right behind me, in the same plane.

And so I'm only partly back, in a state of infirmity and fuzzy thinking.  That thinking suggests that I did, after all, have something to declare:  An infectious cough.

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* And no, Zeus certainly is not a sexist!  Just like Kavanaugh, he was born out of a female creature and just like Kavanaugh, he has daughters.  And so on.