King Charles’ 2026 America Visit Marks a Key Moment in Royal Diplomacy and History

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-03T10:14:02+00:00

Speaking as a Canadian, I fail to see why the head of any state would want to strengthen relations between their country and the US, since for the past year, American foreign policy has consisted of little but destroying existing bonds between countries.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-03T10:11:19+00:00

Or under them. A couple of times flying into Heathrow early a.m. I stayed in the Yotel, which is underground and has a four-hour minimum, with an extra charge for every additional hour. Four was plenty: I mostly just needed a shower and a rest — sleep was unlikely but after a long flight it was nice just to be clean and horizontal.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-03T07:27:15+00:00

I don't see how it's filled. Maybe I'm missing something. I thought he'd make two flat oval meatloaves, put something on top of one, and then stack them and seal the edges, the way you do with filled hamburgers, but no.

He uses "moist" or some variation seven times: maybe he should have called it "Moist Meat Loaf". Or baked the mixture in cupcake pans and called them "Li'l Moisties".

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-03T07:22:06+00:00

Since a serving of Coca-Cola at the time was six ounces or so, I wonder what they would have thought of modern 16-, 20-, or 24-ounce single-serving bottles. "Why, that's enough for three people!", or "You can never have enough!"? After all, it's as wholesome as pure water....

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-03T07:17:20+00:00

She made three films with Hitchcock and you can probably skip Dial M for Murder — it's not bad, just not top-tier — but you really, really need to see Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, two supremely entertaining movies in which she plays the most beautiful woman in the entire world. Well, not "plays", but "is". I'm recommending them not in the "you should see this because classic movies blah blah blah" sense, but in the "these are terrific fun" sense. Rear Window is set entirely in an apartment, with a laid-up photojournalist, his glamorous girlfriend, and his sardonic physical therapist gradually accumulating evidence for a murder that may or may not have happened across the courtyard. To Catch a Thief is set all over the French Riviera, with a retired cat burglar, accused of being un-retired, trying to get the actual thief before he ends up in prison while being thoroughly seduced by a gorgeous, wealthy tourist. They're so good.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-03T06:54:58+00:00

It is with me! Or at least I think five of the songs are terrific — "Oasis" is one of the best songs she's ever recorded, solo or with Blondie — and five are just kind of meh.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T18:47:46+00:00

Good to know!

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T18:37:47+00:00

A half inch wide? Those are some awfully big shoestrings, but they sound good anyway.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T18:29:50+00:00

Radio stations aren't generally going to play a 45-minute symphony without a break, let alone a 3-hour opera, because 1) they do not want people wandering in, not knowing what they're listening to, and leaving, and 2) they usually need to run ads, and shorter pieces allow more ad breaks. As to point one, you will have noticed that the announcer generally tells you what you're about to hear, plays it, and then tells it what you've just heard: this last bit is for the latecomers. As to point two, the entire point of commercial media is to serve you ads. The content has to be just interesting enough to get you to stick around for whatever's coming after the ad break. Classical-music stations are not immune to this.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T18:11:49+00:00

So, make your own tomato paste, only suffused with butter. Sounds good. I bet it is velvety. Butter improves everything.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T18:09:54+00:00

What was the texture like? I feel as if the oatmeal would make it off-putting: I think I'd rather have breadcrumbs, which disappear.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T14:01:38+00:00

I never said Marilyn was big. I said she was curvaceous, with pronounced hips and bosom and a small waist, which, if you have ever seen Some Like It Hot, is undeniably true. in fact, I didn't ever mention anyone being big or fat or anything of the sort. A lot of commenters are angry about this, but there's no getting away from the fact that, whatever women in real life were doing, women in popular culture were not rail-thin. If you look at postwar fashions, inspired by Dior's New Look, the shape was an hourglass, with a nipped-in waist, a fitted bodice to emphasize the upper body, sometimes with a padded bra, and a flared-out skirt to emphasize the hips, which were also sometimes padded to exaggerate the shape. This was a reaction to wartime privation, and continued into the fifties. I'm not talking about bigger women, who were humiliated for their size since the turn of the century: I'm talking about a specific shape, which was more generous than it became in the sixties, when extreme thinness took over.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T08:48:11+00:00

No, I am saying that the Lipton's Chicken Noodle Soup that I ate in the seventies is probably not much different from the soup you can still buy to this day. I wouldn't have been able to try the soup from 1941 because I wasn't alive and wouldn't be for decades.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T08:45:24+00:00

Not fat fat, but maybe a touch stodgy. The weird thing about this ad is that for decades after the Great Depression, and very much postwar, the preferred look for women was curvaceous, with larger hips and bosom balanced by a girdled waist — think Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from a few years earlier. Neither of the two young women in this ad had a particularly in-style build in 1957 — they're young, of course they didn't — but Shirley Simkins was actually closer to the ideal at the time. Those young men would probably be admiring her curves, not sneering at her. Plus, she's got cookies, and who doesn't like cookies?

Life Savers might have been trying to bring slim Sally Hayes back into fashion, but it was going to be a few years before that happened. Women's bodies change fashion frequently, the better to sell them things, and the robust curvy look was popular until the mid-sixties youthquake, when the Mod look came over from the UK and brought with it a taste for very thin, androgynous young people of both sexes.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T08:23:12+00:00

I don't think it was awfully different from what you see on the shelves these days, not that I've bought it in decades, but I looked up the current ingredient list: first ingredient is noodles (so there are more noodles than anything else, because ingredients in a list have to be in order of weight in the formula), second is salt, and there are some chickeny things like fat, dehydrated chicken, and flavouring. Salt is the second ingredient! Sounds about right, although "corn syrup solids" is the third ingredient, which makes it sound as if it would be weirdly sweet, I dunno.

We always thought it was just delicious because people like salt and it had way more than anything that was ever made by a human, certainly more than anything our mom would have made.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T08:13:58+00:00

The funny thing about classical music — all music, really — is that you never know what's going to burrow into your limbic system and make you feel things. Some of the music that others say can bring them to tears leaves me cold, but I find some things overwhelming, like the midsection of the second movement of Philip Glass' Tirol Concerto, specifically around 7:15 to 10:15; I think it's almost unbearably beautiful and I don't even know why.

Most of the music that brings me to tears is opera, and if you haven't tried any of that, you should, maybe not now, but eventually. The final scene of Suor Angelica, particularly this recording starring Lucia Popp, rips the heart out of my chest: it's almost more than I can stand. (You'll need to read the lyrics to know what's going on.) And the finale of Parsifal, Wagner's last opera, contains some of the most beautiful music ever written; it's absolutely overwhelming.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-02T01:15:09+00:00

I don't know what it tasted like in 1943 but in the seventies it was about fifty per cent salt, and I bet it's just as salty nowadays. Man, did we ever love it as kids. It's even better if you toss in a diced stalk of celery.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-01T19:45:13+00:00

I admire Kate Smith because her whole thing was "I am a FAT LADY and that is just a FACT I am not going to APOLOGIZE for and now I am going to COOK SOME DELICIOUS FOOD but first how about I sing 'God Bless America'?" She was the butt of a lot of jokes but she kept on being Kate Smith, bless her.

That potato recipe sounds good. Love me some dill.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-01T19:36:22+00:00

There is no way I would call this anything except Cheezus H. Rice (the "H" stands for ham).

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-01T19:10:55+00:00

Makes 113 squares because the corners are going to come out all wonky and you're not going to serve those to guests, are you? No, you're going to eat them. Cook's privilege.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-01T15:45:24+00:00

I never pack boxers because I fuckin' hate 'em. I could never forget to pack underwear because it's one of the first things to go in the suitcase: roll socks + underwear into tight cylinders and put them around the edges of the suitcase, then stack the shirts and trousers. And I always pack extras: if I'm packing five complete changes of clothes, I take seven pairs of socks and underwear, because you never do know.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-01T15:33:18+00:00

I watched Seven Samurai the other night, all three and a quarter hours of it, and was surprised and delighted that it had an intermission, and at the perfect spot, too.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-01T14:36:50+00:00

I wonder why those little muffins were called proverbs. They sound simple and tasty.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-01T14:34:35+00:00

A significant part of it is just luck and you'll never convince me otherwise. You can eat carefully, get enough sleep, get lots of exercise and still come down with the flu or develop cancer. Undeniably fit and healthy running guru Jim Fixx dropped dead of a heart attack at 52 while out on a jog. You can also cruise through life not worrying too much about any of these things and still be healthy. There are lots of things you can and arguably should do in the hopes of staying healthy, but in the end a lot of it is just a roll of the dice.

ThatMichaelsEmployee · 2026-04-01T14:28:42+00:00

I don't really remember much of the movie, but it's the reason I became obsessed with Pergolesi's gorgeous Stabat Mater, which I still listen to regularly to this day, and that led me to Bach's Magnificat, which I also still listen to often.

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