Love's First Bloom

Or something alone those lines. This episode is definitely delivered in a plain brown albeit virtual wrapper. You can read about it or listen about it, as suits your fancy. Or you can poke your eye out with a stick, if that's the way you roll.

We almost didn't make it this week. The Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over the dad-blamed guvmint, as he calls it. "You think they didn't do anything the last two years?" he says. "You ain't seen nothin' yet. Or, more to the point, you're going to see so much more nuthin' that the nuthin' you're seeing now will look like a beehive on methedrine."

Whatever. Me, I always vote for the Whigs and I expect nothing from our Lords and Masters aside from debt, taxes and a little TLC going through airport security. As my mother likes to say, wear clean underwear: you never know when you'll have to stand up for a body search.

Obama in stitches over this week's Nostrum!

The latest episode is in the usual sort of place, audio and eyedio.

We almost didn't make it this week. The Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over the whole NYC school board business. Good old Mike wanted to hire some magazine babe, and the powers the be sayin' no to Mike said, uh, how about you get us somebody with some experience in education? So Mike crumbled, and now it's a two-person job, held sort of jointly by Magazine Babe and Education Guy. "It's almost like the Roman Empire," the Mite opines. "All they need is one more person for a triumvirate, and we all know how well that worked out." On the other hand, he wouldn't mind getting a publishing magnate to run the Boston schools. "I'd like free magazines in the faculty men's room," he says.

He always was easy to please on the hard stuff, and hard to please on the easy stuff.

The lame duck episode

The latest Nostrum is up and running (audio / pdfio). We almost didn't make it this week. The Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over the rise and fall of the Democrats. "They had majorities in both houses and they still couldn't do squat," he moans. He's a big moaner. "Now we've got three parties—Democrats, Republicans and Tea Baggers—and nobody will ever be able to do anything ever again because all they care about is sending Obama back to Kenya where he belongs. Even the Democrats want to send him back to Kenya where he belongs. I'll bet Pelosi is pretty pissed off now about forging that birth certificate for him lo those many years ago..."

Never hold a conversation with the Nostrumite around election time.

Nostrum Series 2, Now in Amazing Nostrumvision! Featuring Real State-of-the Art Monophonic Sound Recording!

Episode 29 of Series 2 is now available at no cost to you either as a pdf or an mp3. What you do with it is up to you.

We almost didn't make it this week. The Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over the whole 3D movie thing. "On the one hand, I'm happy that Harry Potter Part Seven (Part One) is missing a D or two, given that the whole 3D thing is enough of a ripoff, much less two Harry Potter movies from the same book that was in fact the dullest of the lot. Why don't they make a weekly series out of it? Harry Potter 5-0 or CSI: Hogwarts if they just want it never to end?" On the other hand, the idea of Tron 2 in 3D has him leaking from every pore. He just sits around all day muttering "Tron," "Tron," "Tron"—one for each D—while the Nostrumate goes about seeing to the children and making sure there's gruel on the table.

Is it any wonder it takes us so long to get to these episodes?

Do I contradict myself? Feh!

All right. That's not exactly Walt Whitman. But whenever I go back and look up something in Nostrum, it seems as if the last time we wrote about it, we called it something else. Take New Haven, for instance. For the longest time, we called it New Haven. Then all of a sudden we started calling it Pup City. I blame the Nostrumite for this lack of consistency, since he's in charge of remembering where we've been, but lately he's been useless. The lad is in a state of permanent depression over imminent arrival of an operating system upgrade for his iPad, which he treasures more than his wife, his children or his left lung. "If it's like every other Apple upgrade," he moans, "it won't work for a week, it will erase all my data, and I'll lose my high score on Angry Birds."

How he survives in the world I do not know. Anyhow, speaking of people who hardly seem to survive in the world, Menick, operating at his own rate of non-speed, has finally recorded and posted N2_28 in both live performance and dead electron versions. Have at them.

A long time between drinks

You know, Menick can really stretch these suckers out. We delivered the latest episode to him last week, and it wasn't until last night that he recorded it, and not until two minutes ago that he bothered to tell anyone. Jeesh! Of course, even before this, the Nostrumite was in a state of permanent depression over his experiences at Bronx Science. He showed up with the Tennessee Williams team on Friday, rarin' to go, and he found out that no one had ever gotten his preference sheet which he swore he sent before the deadline, he found out that he was the lowest preferred judge in the pool, meaning that he adjudicated exactly one 0-6 round, and he came to the conclusion that, "no matter how you slice it, whether or not you call it 'Tastes of the Mediterranean,' it's still debate ziti."

Read it or listen to it. What do we care?

The man is impossible

And I don't mean the Mite.

So the Nostrumite and I, we work, we slave, we grind out episodes like Sarah Palin grinding out grizzlies, and what does he do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They're sitting there, piled up on his whatever, while he goes out gallivanting and clubbing baby seals and generally enjoying total hoo-ha. In other words, Menick has sent both of us into a state of permanent depression. "What Would Menick Do?" Well, aside from putting off narrating Nostrums, we would have to answer, Not much.

Aaaaarrrrrggghhhhh!

Finally you can listen to himself ruin yet another episode, or read it as we originally wrote it, before he tucked his liver lips into it.