Reading: Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

Viewing: "The Straight Story" and a lunar eclipse.

Moving: Thirty minutes on the elliptical trainer (level five, "fat-burner" program), plus a weight-circuit

Learning: how good French chocolate is

20 January 2000: Chocolate with nuts

When I got home from "The Straight Story" last night, of course I wanted to spend some quality time with my little buddy, that is as soon as I took off my offensive jacket along with everything else and put on my bathrobe. Buddy, bathrobe, couch, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles, and of course the tv remote. Quality time, I say.

So I was channel-hopping and there was nothing on and I ended up watching "Win Ben Stein's Money." As always, during a commercial break I started channel-hopping. The next channel up from Comedy Central is E! and there was Howard Stern. In the instant I had to hear his voice, what I heard him say was "The Nut Lady."

Well that was that. I was riveted to my seat. The Nut Lady and I go way back, and she was going to be on Howard Stern? I was so there. I didn't even channel-hop through the commercials that immediately followed. Yeah, I watched Howard Stern. Bite me.

Elizabeth Tashjian, aka the Nut Lady, runs the world-famous (?) Nut Museum located in scenic Old Lyme, Connecticut. The museum is featured (on the cover?) in Roadside America.

(PLT had this book, no surprise there, but also HAO's friend Ben gave it to her because of some crane or bulldozer called Big Brutus that looms near them in deepest Oklahoma.) Retraction with an on-your-knees apology,* fifteen hours later: Big Brutus is in fact in Kansas, not Oklahoma. (HAO also said it was a steamrollershovel, not a crane or bulldozer, and said that was a minor point but as I'm correcting my other egregious errors I'll correct them all--except that I made another in the correction and it's a -shovel not a roller.) Big Brutus is the world's largest steamrollershovel and it is located in Kansas, not Oklahoma, West Mineral, Kansas, and HAO and Ben go there to deride Kansas folk for building a state park around a steamshovel and she wouldn't be so gleeful about visiting there if it were in Oklahoma. (It's only 20 minutes from her town, which is a salient point here, but in Kansas. Kansas also borders Colorado (as does Oklahoma) and Rhode Island borders Connecticut so I should shut up). Complete information, verbatim from her email:

loved your overstruck retraction. however, one last *leetle* point. big brutus is not a steamroller, but a steam SHOVEL, as in _mike mulligan and the_. this is an important difference b/c a steam shovel has a scoop and it's actually a bit awe-inspiring to know that an entire bluegrass band can fit comfortably inside the scoop (which was the case the first time we ever visited there).

also, it's the world's second-largest st. shovel, not the largest, sad to say. people should have all the facts on this. and it's sixteen stories tall, so you can only wonder how tall the world's largest is.

*An on-your-knees apology is a point of curtesy invented by the Charenton family in the interest of keeping the peace among three children and two parents, all blustery big talkers. Sinking to one knee and inventing some long-winded apology usually makes everyone laugh and ameliorates a hurt situation. Also used in jest.

This woman is a freak. She is the curator of the Nut Museum, so that previous sentence was probably redundant information. In the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest nut in the world is listed as the a specimen of the Coco de Mer, as I recollect, preserved in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Guess where. The Nut Museum attracts freaks, PLT, and Brownie troops. I was a Brownie, but if I was brought there I have no recollection. I should like to go, because hey, it's the Nut Museum located in scenic Old Lyme, Connecticut, but I have harbored a strong resentment of the old spinster since I was 17 and I don't want to give her anything, such as my presence in her museum, or its admission price, which last I knew was $0.50 and one nut (peanuts accepted, which is stupid). While paging at PGN, sitting behind the circ desk one day, a shrunken and bent decrepit female entered the 'brary and passed into the genealogy room. She made some copies and puttered about and approached the desk.

"I made [however many let's say twenty] copies," she droned.

"Okay, that'll be one dollar," I told her.

She bristled. "I don't have to pay for my copies." That was it; she didn't say why. But she sounded pretty sure of herself and it was at Phoebe that I perfected the obsequious manner for which I am now famous, so I just asked sweetly, "No? Why not?"

She bristled again. "Obviously you haven't lived in town for very long."

I was just as rabidly loyal to my town as a resident teenager as I am as a 31-year-old, nostalgic (read maudlin) erratic in Denver. I think the fact that I did love and pay fealty to my town while I was a teenager measures just what a fanatic I am. So I bristled right back at her.

"No, not very long, only 17 years," I said, because in a small New England town like ours, you can still be a newcomer at 17 years. "Just my whole life."

She wasn't a native, damn it. She's the kind of character whom people around the country, watching her on the Tonight Show and the Late Show, must think is just a gentle old eccentric soul but with whom we had to live, and at whom we could snicker as she rode her old-fashioned bike in the small circuit that is her world--Ferry Road to Shore Road to Ferry Road again to Lyme Street (the library and galleries) to Hall's Road (the A&P and post office and bank) to Shore Road again and thence home.

So there she was on Howard Stern, she on her phone (with a cord) presumably from her house-museum on Ferry Road with a camera crew and he in his studio. I wonder why she didn't go to New York. Is he in New York or L.A.? I wouldn't be surprised if she doesn't fly. She used to take a taxi to Old Saybrook and train into New York when she went on David Letterman. Wait, she must have flown sometime; she was on Johnny Carson, and wasn't his studio in L.A.? Well, anyway, she didn't go to Howard Stern's studio, and freaky as she is there's no contest between the two whom I dislike more. If she'd gone to his studio he probably would've asked to see her tits (all the female guests I've had the misfortune to channel-hop (I swear) through seem anxious to show 'em). So.

And it's Howard Stern! She has a nut museum! Did she understand the point of his questioning? His assumption was clearly that she would not understand. Did she insist on singing her Nut Anthem or her Nut Love Song, and did he decide these ditties were too pure and leave that footage on the cutting room floor? Didn't she--if she hasn't changed, and I don't see how she might have, she must have--run through her litany of where the museum is and what its mission is? Did she want the world to know she wanted to have a Nut Theme Amusement Park right there in tightly zoned scenic Old Lyme, Connecticut? Who knows. Whatever she did say that wasn't to his purpose didn't get aired, if she did say anything. What he aired were questions and answers about where the biggest nuts come from, whether black nuts are the biggest ("no, but they're the hardest to crack"), are some nuts tougher to crack than others, is a nut ever a seed, just as you'd expect.

---

What else.

Ah yes, HAO and I saw "The Straight Story" last night. More on the movie later. I had to raid my laundry quarters for the ticket since the Chez Artiste doesn't take plastic. HAO in her infinite generosity did treat me to popcorn and chocolate and a small soda (since I didn't see her furtively signal that our soda--excuse me, my soda and her pop--were inside her jacket already) but then, in her also infinite intimate knowledge of how to tease me, said wonderingly, "Laundry quarters? What are those? Why would you need quarters to do laundry?" because of course her highly superior apartment has a washer and dryer built in. Swine.

Brilliant swine though. Here's her latest paper topic: how Margery Kempe and Alice Kaplan try to make martyrs of themselves in language. I don't know either as well as she but that sounds like a sound and a meaty thesis to me.

And DEDBG's Christmas package came! Three books, Cromartie v. the God Shiva Acting Through the Government of India (a mystery, I think), Isabel's Bed (which I've also never heard of) and The God of Small Things, which I have heard of since it won the 1997 Booker. Plus lavender incense and a bag of tea (Thé de Fête, Mélange vanillé fruité pour la journée) plus--this is the most amazing thing--a box of chocolates the likes of which I don't think you can buy this side of the pond. The first one I bit into had an amazing raspberry chocolate center, whereupon I nearly experience le petit mort, and then I rooted through the tumble of succulent things and decided, pragmatic that I am, to get rid of the white chocolate one first--and it had a real chocolate center! These Frainchies might not know how to make chocolate into chips, but what chocolate they do know how to make they do make well!

My darling peanut. Naturally it was almost 5:00 when I opened the package and no matter how much you liked to be thanked you probably don't want to be woken at midnight for it. Stupid timezones.