Should I apologize for abandoning Evelyn last week, or say “you’re welcome?” At least I know her name now; that’s a relief. I’ve been calling her “Macchiato,” for the Starbucks cup she used to carry around. Then she got one of those Stanley mega-mugs, and that sort of scuttled the nickname. I’m pleased, but also dismayed, by the notes we got in praise of Evelyn’s “poem.” I would have hoped you wouldn’t encourage her.

And speaking of things we shouldn’t encourage, Substack, the company that brings the Ostrich to your inbox, has affirmed its position that real, avowed neo-nazis are welcome to host publications on their platform. While there are nuanced conversations to be had about censorship on private forums, or the implicit requirements of open discourse, the math in this case is simple. If Substack is happy paying nazis to be nazis, they can’t have any more of my money.

We’ll be moving the Ostrich to its own domain on the Ghost platform, as of next week. To make sure you don’t miss future issues, we’d be grateful if you’d add “ostrich@thedailyostrich.com” to your contact list. And if next week’s email lands in your junk folder, please click whatever button assures your provider that The Daily Ostrich is cherished junk that you’re saving on purpose.

In local news, it’s been a balmy few days on my bend of the river, enough to summon up the tulip shoots. Maybe this will prove to be one of our new, carbon-toasted mini-winters, but I smell a false spring. Our local Mistress Nature loves this trick where she trots out the sun for two weeks, about now, and the puffy jackets come off, and we all jump around like skittering lambs. Then follows a slushy March and another three months of flat, gray clouds you could poke with a twelve-foot pole.

So I’ll be thrilled to get outside this afternoon, but I’m shrewd enough to stock up on indoor amusements. With that in mind, I’m hoping you and I can arrange a trade. I’ll tell you about a book and a game I’ve enjoyed this winter, and then, if you’re willing, I’d love it if you’d do the same.

I’ve been reading The Hexologists by Josiah Bancroft, and while I’m not to the end yet, I like the style of writing: a load of silliness dressed up with ingenious description and sharp sentences.

Our new game this winter is There’s Been A Murder, a cooperative card game where players use secret information to unmask a murderer before it’s too late. For strategy lovers, it may involve too much random luck, but I’m not put off by randomness, as you’re aware.

[Late-breaking note: Whilst writing the above, I looked up There’s Been a Murder to see what other people thought, and the board game forums kept comparing it to another game called Love Letter. So off I went Cloud Cap Games, to see what I was missing, and it seems I was missing a good time. Love Letter is an even better game, thought it’s competitive. If you’re a cooperative sort, try TBaM.]

If you have a book or a game you’ve enjoyed recently, send a reply to this email or leave a comment, and let us know! I’ll print the results next week, and we can all benefit from each other’s wisdom.

I bet that’s the reason he didn’t come into the office today. If he wrote an article for the front page, I can’t find it in his desk, and there’s nobody in the writers’ room, either, so I guess that means I’m on my own. But don’t worry—I have the perfect thing!

I keep showing Mr. George my poems, and he keeps saying he’ll print one “when the time comes,” but the time never comes. Until now!

Et, Poets
by Evelyn West

I think that I shall never know
A tree as shady as a po
Et squinting by a burned-down can
Dle, clutching a cup with a broken han
Dle. Crossing out words with a chewed up pen
Cil, chained at her desk till she’s going men

Tal. Poets’ trunks are made of in
K, commas are their blossoms pin
K. Words are the leaves they spread out wid
E, flowing lines are the limbs they prid
E. Seeding where others dare not grow
That’s the life of the wind-blown po

(Isn’t that good? I have more!)

In less than thirty seconds I’d called up Vera Maraschino and told her I had a gig for her. In retrospect, I should have thought a little harder. In retrospect, she should have thought to ask, “What’s the gig?”

I had her meet me in our newly spruced-up Ostrich Kitchenette, and her first question, upon meeting there, was, “Why are we in the kitchen?”

“Because you’re our new food writer,” I told her.

“Our new what writer?” she said.

“Food writer. Didn’t I mention that?”

“I don’t think you fucking did.”

“You’ll make a great food writer,” I assured her.

“Don’t patronize me, you ass,” she said. “I’m not gonna be a food writer. I don’t cook.”

“You must cook something,” I ventured.

“I’d starve without Uber Eats,” she said. “Literally. I go into my kitchen for exactly two reasons: to open a bottle of wine, and to make popcorn.”

“So that’s something,” I encouraged her. “You know how to use the popcorn button on your microwave.”

“I don’t have a microwave,” she said, actually scoffing. “What would I do with a microwave?”

“—Make popcorn?” I suggested. “How do you make popcorn?”

“Ugh.” She rolled her eyes like a twelve-year-old. “Heathen,” she said. (And this was when I knew I’d hired the right person.) “Get me a pot. One with a lid.”

How Vera Maraschino Makes Popcorn

1. With a mortar and pestle, grind a teaspoon of fleur de sel, or other sea salt, to a fine power. Toss the salt into the pot.

2. Put a heaping tablespoon of coconut oil into a pot, and let it melt on medium heat. Make sure the oil has coated the bottom, and let it get hot before you put the popcorn in.

3. Measure half a cup of quality popcorn kernels. (“Not this grocery store shit,” Vera told me, for next time. “Orville Redenbacher?” I suggested. “Maybe,” she said. “That guy smiles like he’s telling himself a dirty joke.”) Put the kernels into the pot, and stir to coat them in oil and salt. Spread them out into a single layer.

4. Leave uncovered until the first kernel pops. Then put on the lid and turn the heat to medium-high, to keep the electric burner from cycling off. (“Don’t keep shaking it like a toddler,” she said, frighteningly. “Let it sit there and pop.”)

5. When the popping starts to slow, do shake the pot a few times, holding the lid with your thumbs to keep the popcorn (but not your thumbs) from burning. When the popping has basically stopped, transfer the popcorn to a bowl as fast as possible. (“It’s not Saving Private Ryan. Let the lazy ones live with their life choice.”)

6. In the bowl, drizzle the popcorn with a fine stream of olive oil, and drop a few pinches of sea salt and black pepper from your fingers, from high above the bowl. Shake the bowl to mix the popcorn, and repeat the drizzling and seasoning several more times.

7. Eat it “effing now.”

I’ve always been a buttered-popcorn man, but Vera’s olive oil was almost butterier than butter, if that’s possible. Call me a convert.

She said if she’d been at home she would have used her special spice mixture— “popcorn Jesus,” she calls it. She says she’d never measured the ingredients, but it includes, in descending order of quantity: nutritional yeast, fine sea salt, ground red pepper, granulated garlic, black pepper, oregano, and ground ginger. I tried it myself, and—yes.

When she’d finished my lesson, Vera told me, in a colorful tirade I won’t print, that I needn’t call her again until I’m looking for a fashion writer. She’s the type who means what she says, but, all the same, I bought a case of red wine for the Ostrich Kitchenette. Clayton can take it out of my paycheck.

Hello dear readers! It’s your doting genie, delighted to write my first column of the new year. I’ve had two letters in a similar vein, so I’ll take them both together.

Dear Genie,
Do you ever regret a wish, after you grant it, or is that not something you think about?
Signed, Sadder But Wiser

Dear Genie,
Don’t you get pissed off sometimes? I’m a family law judge, and I hear wishes every day that piss me off. Are you allowed to walk away from a wish, or do you have to grant them once you’ve heard them?
Signed, Fed Up At The Bench

Dear Fed Up and Sadder,
I’ve regretted quite a few granted wishes. (I wrote a whole book about one of them—I hope to print it someday.) The biggest one came early in my genie-journey. Some lunatic asked me to remake the moon out of cheese, and in a nihilistic funk, I did it. I used a farmers’ cheese with moon-colored mold around it. You couldn’t tell the difference, but it didn’t sit right with me. Thankfully I knew a better-than-average wizard, and changing it back wasn’t as hard as you’d think. It was only cheese for a month or two—I wonder how people caught wind of it.

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Yes, Fed Up, I hear a great many wishes that make me angry. I am allowed to walk away, and I do quite frequently, though my incentive to accept a wish is rather strong. For a few examples: I turned down a wish to freeze the oceans. You’re welcome for that. And I nixed one that would have made all the deer fat and slow. I’ve walked away from a hundred kinds of petty revenge, and from scores of supposedly-scorned lovers. I turned down a girl who wanted every crow to caw, “Your beautiful!” (I was tempted, but crows have a right to their opinions.) Just last year I turned down a wish for seven new plagues, since I hate to be redundant.

But I grant some wishes, even when they tick me off. Sometimes a wish is the surest way for the wisher to learn his lesson. Other times I’m afraid the wisher will satisfy his own cruel desire, and I’d rather grant it myself, in my own way. Contrary to what people think, I usually try to grant the spirit of a wish, but there are times when I make liberal use of wiggle room in the phrasing.

One man told me, fists ashaking, the tale of his ungrateful daughter, who’d run off in the night and married an indigent road-mender, out of spite for her loving father. He wanted me to curse her with boils and a barren womb. I convinced him I could do more harm if he left me room for creativity. We made the pact on, “Curse my daughter with a heavy fate, such as she deserves.”

I knocked on her door, to see what I was working with. She invited me right in to dinner, giving me the bowl of broth that would have been hers. I never know what to do with a gesture like that, but it would have been rude to refuse. Her husband was quite poor. Their little hovel was as spare as anything, save for the flower garlands she’d strung up. But we laughed away the evening, and it seemed to me that you’d rarely find a happier couple, nor one more generous. So. I cursed her with the burden of wealth, and I’m pleased to say the both of them held up solidly. I also gave her the duty—since a curse must be a curse—to take a basket once a day to her old, mute, housebound father, and send a servant now and then to bathe him. And that she did, as long as he lived. Which wasn’t all that long.

The more you play, the harder it gets. Every movie I rescue from oblivion is one more off the board for the next game. Just this week, I burned Arachnophobia and Benjamin Button, which won’t count again for at least a few years. Still, I’ll try it now, and see what else I can dig up from the murk.

Let’s see—

• Big Trouble in Little China. There’s a good one to start with. (Not to be confused with Big Trouble, a movie I’d never forget.) Was this the movie where Jackie Chan slides down a roof and nearly kills himself in real life, or the one where he stunt-falls onto an awning and nearly kills himself in real life? Or something to do with a motorcycle gang? Count it for the game, in any case.

• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Think of it—until just now, I’d achieved what George Lazenby spent his whole career trying to do; I forgot about that movie entirely.

• Remember those big nineties action-lawyer movies? What was the name of the third one, after The Firm and The Pelican Brief? (Hey, I can count The Pelican Brief, too!) Ah, The Client, with Susan Sarandon. I had to look it up. Somehow I’d confused John Grisham with Tom Clancy, and was trying to remember what those beefy attorneys had to do with Russian submarines.

• That angel movie with Michael Landon. Wait, no, it was John Travolta. Michael was the name of it. This one’s iffy, because I’m sure I named it in a round of NaMYF a few years ago. I forgot it afterward, and will do so again at the first opportunity.

It’s not always the “forgettable” movies I forget. RoboCop is a wholly forgettable movie, but the new security robots on patrol downtown just earned it another decade of glory. Meanwhile Out of Africa was a Best Picture film, well-deserved, and the three of you who’ve seen it can thank me for scoring a point on your board.

The thrill of the game is not the rescued movies, but the surprising fact that the human brain can play Name a Movie You Forgot. It’s amazing to me that we all have a trove of memories displaced but roughly archived. When a memory disintegrates, we keep the pieces in a box in the basement. We file away a sketch of it, or a photo with a note on the back. It’s gone, but we can re-member it.

For people like me, always hungry for new fascinations, it’s delicious to know there’s a warehouse full of wonders I’ve known and forgotten, there to be recovered by naming the game. And you can play it with any category of experience. Name a Recipe You Forgot, or an animal, an outing, an outfit. I’ve even played Name a Person You Forgot, which always makes me feel ashamed for losing whole, real people to the erosion of time, but glad for the chance remember them.

Maybe this afternoon I’ll play Name a Song I Forgot, and see what snippets of melody I can find to make me tap my foot, or smile at a long-past moment, or cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cryyy if I want to—

(Found one for you! You’re welcome.)

It’s our first annual “News Years Eve” party this evening. (Yes, I regret the name, but the banners are done and printed.) The Ostrich never had a holiday party before—Max Colander wouldn’t allow it, but I think the team can use a night off, once a year. Clayton Brusk assures me he’ll be there, no doubt with a dueling sword at his hip, to taunt me. Winslow Vance says he’ll come, too, after the print run is finished. Beyond that, it might be a small gathering: just me, Mrs. T, Matt Damon, and the news desk admin who’s mad I forgot her name, and won’t let anyone remind me. The genie might drop by early on. New Years Eve is a big night for him, I understand.

I’ve invited the Casual-Observer crowd, but haven’t heard back from anyone. I know they were hoping I’d find them work at the Ostrich sooner. The budget’s looking rosy, though; I bet I can convince Clayton we’re solvent enough to bring on a few good columnists. Hopefully no one snatches them up in the meantime.

And that’s the state of things. I’ve worn a butt-sized indentation in my new office chair, and the old guard is starting to realize I’m serious about my job as publisher. I’m not just in it for the tycoonitude, as much as I relish that aspect. I still wake up sweaty from the occasional nightmare that I don’t own a newspaper, and it’s so relieving to rub my eyes and discover that, of course, I do. If you’ve ever thought about buying one, I recommend it. It really is the best feeling.

We’ll be back next week with an issue that’s about something. For today, there are hats to be fetched from the party store, and silver tinsel to hang from the rafters.

Here’s to a year full of wonder, delight, and contentment (I’m looking at you, November). Whatever comes, the Ostrich has your back. We’ll be here to cover all the news that’s not too scary, and to pass on any interesting whale facts that come across our desk. Raise a glass for us tonight, as we raise ours for you!

“Suppose I tell you a Christmas story that’s sort of different; one without toys, and, if you don’t mind, without Santa Claus,” says Squire the badger, in the 1979 animated Christmas special, The Tiny Tree.

“A Christmas story without Santa Claus?” says the little bunny, incredulous.

“That’s right,” says Squire. “It’s a story about love. And sharing.”

Skip forward a few minutes and you’ll meet Horace the Vegetarian Hawk, a Dom DeLuise look-alike, if Dom’s feathers formed a natural turtleneck collar. He affably steals an onion from a frightened mole, in a scene that plays out like a protection racket. This comes on the heels of the song Tell It To a Turtle, the reason I hunted down The Tiny Tree on YouTube. It seems there’s not much to tell about Tell It To a Turtle. It’s exactly the following, with repetition:

“If you have a little secret, and you don’t think that it can last, simply tell it to a turtle, and it won’t get around very fast.”

If that’s not genius on its own, Tell It To a Turtle has an irresistably catchy tune, as you’d expect from Johnny Marks, the man who wrote Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day and A Holly Jolly Christmas and, most notably, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I didn’t watch the end of The Tiny Tree so I can’t tell you how it turns into a Christmas story, but I take it on faith that it does.

It’s an indisputable fact that Johnny Marks loved Christmas, though some people persist in disputing it, on the arguments that Johnny Marks was Jewish, and worked on Madison Avenue, and his songs don’t have any babies or mangers in them anywhere. One could see him as a conundrum, like a vegetarian hawk, but I don’t.

As Garrison Keillor said, “A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.”

Christmas doesn’t just happen around us, it happens to us. It happens to Jewish boys from Greenwich Village as profoundly as it does to anyone. Johnny Marks grew up in a city that hoisted a giant fir in Times Square, skated at Rockefeller Plaza, strung itself in silver bells and electric lights, and put toys on display in magical storefront windows. Why shouldn’t he love that? It’s his to love.

I read about a survey of the American public on its use of “Happy Holidays” vs. “Merry Christmas.” “Happy Holidays” was most strongly preferred in Atlanta, a city proud of its diversity. “Merry Christmas” was most strongly preferred in Minnesota, where 75% of residents profess a Christian faith. But strangely, my own Pacific Northwest, the nation’s least-religious corner, also strongly preferred “Merry Christmas” over “Happy Holidays.” The survey team hypothesized (correctly) that Pacific Northwesterners don’t think of Christmas as a Christian holiday in the first place. To us, saying “Merry Christmas” is the same as singing “there’ll be snow, and mistletoe, so grab a cup of cheer.” We recognize that different people have different attachments to Christmas, but in the dark, rainy months of winter, anyone who puts up a string of lights is a good neighbor to have.

To those of you celebrating the birth of a savior, I wish you a meaningful Christmas in the best and deepest of ways. To those who celebrate other holidays, I hope yours are (or were) delightful. And to those like me and Johnny, who merely love the sentiment of bells and trees and lights and cookies and love and sharing, a Merry Christmas, one and all!

(And if you think that Christmas, a thoroughly borrowed holiday, is anyone’s personal property, kindly tell it to a turtle.)

The winter solstice is today (technically this evening) which means tomorrow’s the day to start your winter themes, if that practice floats your boat. For myself, I’ll be starting my Winter of Motion. I find the winter an easy time to stagnate, so I’m gently reminding myself to keep my work, my projects, my body moving, and generate some forward energy.

If you want to have your winter theme witnessed by a human being, send it my way. I won’t print them, for privacy’s sake, but I’ll build them all a little castle on my imaginary island.

And whether your theming or not, a happy winter to you!

Maybe you remember Blendtec’s eye-opening video series, “Will it Blend?” which put their blender to the test against golf balls, bic lighters and glow sticks, and inspired a nation of impressionable children to ruin their mothers’ blenders and iPhones in the same instant. I went through a similar phase in my twenties, with a Fry Daddy Jr. (A case-study in bad branding, and an equally poor deep fryer.) For weeks I terrorized the pantry, casting my wicked eye on anything edible. “Oh, yesss,” I’d hiss at the granola bars, “you’ll fry up nicely. Into the batter, my pretty.” I learned you can deep-fry slices of cake, but there are technical reasons why people don’t, along with digestive ones.

Now I have an ice cream maker. And you know what does taste like eggnog? Eggnog!

I understand that, as rash experiments go, this one is sort of—tame. Grocery store eggnog is made from milk, cream, eggs, sugar, spices, and thickeners. Those are not weird things to put in an ice cream maker. Those are the least weird things to put in an ice cream maker. But still, if it worked, just imagine! We could go on TikTok with our One Weird Trick Big Dairy Doesn’t Want You To Know! The best discoveries are the ones that seem obvious in retrospect.

On the other hand, when something seems obvious, but nobody’s doing it, there’s occasionally a reason.

The first thing I needed, if I meant to ice-cream a carton of eggnog, was a booze delivery method. I like eggnog fine without the bourbon, but I knew there’d be complaints if I left it out. So step one was to make Salt & Straw’s “Perfect Ice Cream Caramel,” adding two tablespoons of Maker’s Mark at the end.

The next part was by far the easiest. I poured eggnog from the carton right into the ice cream maker and let it churn. Meanwhile, I sacrificed three of Mrs. Tycoon’s almond-anise biscotti to the crusher.

All that remained was to pack the frozen eggnog with the carmel and cookie pieces, and leave it to cure in the freezer.

You can’t have ice cream for breakfast—that’s a rule everyone should follow. But this time of year the good light is in the morning, so I had tea for breakfast, and saved the ice cream for a morning snack (several minutes later.)

The Verdict:

The final product came out promisingly ice-cream-shaped. As for the taste, I’d give it a B minus, which is the worst grade for the needs of a newspaper food column. If it had gone better, I’d be TikTok famous already, and if it had gone worse, you’d have exciting pictures of a kitchen on fire.

If this were a high-budget cooking magazine, we’d send the interns back to the kitchen for another ten attempts, and they’d come up with something dandy.

The structure is more crystalline than I’d hoped. I suspect that when Darigold lists “milk and cream” as an ingredient, they mean it in the sense of “Simon and Garfunkle.” If I did it again, I’d supplement the cream. I’d also add sugar, which I did not expect. I knew that frozen treats need more sugar to taste equally sweet, but it’s strange to take a liquid that’s quintessentially sweet, and turn it into an ice cream that’s only sweet-ish. The caramel helped a lot in that regard, but ice cream shouldn’t need a crutch, IMHO.

What it does have is the noggyness our first attempt was missing. And when it melts, it melts into eggnog, which is the best failure case I can imagine.

If you saw what I’m wearing right now, you’d be rightly skeptical to hear I’m in the final weeks of my Year of Style. From the outside, you might guess that 2023 was my Year of Sucrose or my Year of Blathering. But no, it was my Year of Style, and, on the whole, I think it’s gone quite well.

Last December I ran into this video by CGP Grey, called “Your Theme,” wherein Gray makes the case that resolutions are regret recipes, and themes are where it’s at. Instead of setting goals and failing to meet them, you give yourself a gentle compass. Your theme becomes a guide, pointing out paths you might have missed. You dedicate a chunk of time to that theme, and you see what happens. You can’t fail at a theme. It just is.

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It won’t surprise you that I tend to live in my head, whether in a story, or a line of code, or a daydream. I’m tempted to forget I’m in a body, and my body is someplace: in a room, at a desk, in the car, wherever. And that’s a sad thing, because I like my body. It’s quirky and capable and fun to spend time with. I always mean to give it nice things to wear and a likeable space to inhabit.

Meanwhile, in my mid-forties, the urge to become somebody in particular, rather than just somebody, feels urgent. So I named this year my Year of Style.

I expected to end my Year of Style with a bunch of finished art and a pair of fashionable shoes. Instead, I did—this. This Ostrich situation. Which is not what I expected, but it suits me quite well.

Other discoveries from my Year of Style:

• Cool-guy sunglasses. You put them on, and people treat you like a cool guy. Instantaneous charisma, and all it costs is money!

• Fountain pens. What could be more tycoon-punk than a fountain pen? The answer is nothing. I’ve found my people, and my people are pens.

• Copper rivets. I learned how to peen copper rivets, and now I can use “peen” in polite conversation. Need a rivet peened? I’ll peen it right up.

• Area rugs. I have big plans to turn my bedroom office into the ultimate tycoon study. With my Year of Style ending, I’m worried I might not finish it. All I’ve done so far is to buy a desk and a rug. The desk doesn’t care whether I finish the work or not, but the rug cares. It draws me into its hypnotic pattern and tells me I must not fail!

My larger discovery was a disappointing one. When I started asking myself “what would improve the vibe here?” The first answer wasn’t “a stolen Caravaggio,” as I was hoping. It was “fix the door that’s been broken for a decade.” Style, it turns out, is largely about keeping things in good repair, which is hard news for the likes of me. My Year of Style was less an experiment in white belts than a time to rearrange the furniture, get rid of old shirts, and actually fix shit I’ve been avoiding for years.

Regardless, my theme stuck with me, all through the year. I’m even tempted to make 2024 a Sequel to the Year of Style, but I won’t. In fact, I don’t think 2024 will be my Year of Anything. A year is a long time to keep a theme sharp. Instead, I’m going to set myself a winter theme, and change it in the spring. And that’s why I mention it now. The winter solstice is next week. (I know!)

I have a few ideas for my winter theme, and they all scare me, which probably means I’m on the right track. Whichever one I choose, I’ll announce it here, for the sake of accountability. If you like the idea, you have until the 22nd to choose your winter theme. I recommend Gray’s advice to pick a theme that’s “broad, directional, and resonant.” If you do, I’d love to hear about it. Send me a note or leave a comment, and we can goad each other on.