Dessert Detective: The Case of the Caloric Car Ride.

An envelope slipped under my door. It could only mean one thing. It could only mean I need to fix the weather stripping. A guy could get a draft and get sick. Even the toughest guy could get a chill. The cold could even affect the “Dessert Detective”.

I’m the famous “Dessert Detective. I can find any lost dessert. In a snit over a snatched snicker doodle? I’m your guy. Perplexed about a purloined pie? No problem. Why, just today I solved a big case.

My wife yelled from the kitchen. “What happened to the cookies I made for the kids?” she implored. “I ate them”, I replied. Another case solved, and solved right. It’s what I do.

I walk over the envelope two or three days. I was on my way back to the recliner and another envelope slithered under the door. I really need to get that weather stripping fixed, and I will, as soon as Food TV gives me a break. Non-food related commercials were on, so I picked up the envelope. Something was in it. I shook the envelope over the coffee table and a note fell out. It was a paper note, not the musical kind.
I noted the note was annotated. Printed on it was “Open the other envelope, you idiot.”

I opened the other envelope. Printed on the contents was one word. It merely said “Horace”. I tossed it on the table and settled back to watch the show about diving into a diner. That guy really needs to do something about his hair.

Early the next morning I was slathering Nutella on my jelly donut when the phone rang. I answered it with my sexiest “Dessert Detective here, what do you need, sugar cakes?” A voice whispered one word, “Yellow”. The caller hung up. I was curious. I was intrigued. How could I get Nutella inside the donut? How?

I went upstairs to shower and shave. There, written on the mirror in lipstick was one word, Nuevo. That was curious. Why is someone doing Spanish homework on the mirror? The kids must be out of paper.

After a refreshing shower I went to the bedroom to get dressed. My wife was packing a suitcase. “Where are you going, to see your mother? Tell her I died, that should make her day.” I said.

“We’re going. We’re going to follow the clues.” My wife replied.
Clues, what clues? I ain’t got no stinking clues.

The wife started in on a lecture. She droned on like a ceiling fan with a bent blade and a bad bearing that screeched on and on.
“The clues are Horace, for Horace Greely. He said go West. Yellow in Spanish is Amarillo, which is a city in Texas. Nuevo is Spanish New, like in New Mexico. So we’re going West to Amarillo, and then on to New Mexico. I can’t believe you didn’t even know they were clues to a mystery.”
“Maybe I missed it, but I have a bigger mystery. Where are we getting lunch? I’m hungry.”

We got the snacks and suitcases in the car and drove west. We moved west like the first pioneers that braved hot deserts and violent natives to bring baked goods to the far reaches of the continent. We drove on into the night. We drove into a night as dark as a vegan chef’s soul. We drove ever nearer to dangerous gluten-free lands.

I dozed off while the wife drove. She shook me awake. I jumped up ready to do battle. I jumped up ready to do battle and stop at an IHOP for breakfast.

At first, I thought I was dreaming. I awoke as confused as an ant at a sugar-free picnic. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I looked at my smirking wife and then out of the windshield. I opened the car door and stepped out. I felt weak. I dropped to my knees. It was so beautiful. It was just perfect.

My wife leaned over. “Happy birthday, you pie detective. Welcome to Pie Town, New Mexico.”

I went to heaven, and it’s west of the Mississippi. It’s Pie Town. Many are called; few are chosen- for Pie Town.
Tune in next time for Dessert Detective: Ganache me not.

Aborting Our Future.

I’ve been advised not to write about abortion because it’s a very emotional issue on all sides. Before reading this let me tell you that I am strongly anti-abortion. If this offends you may want to move on to the funnies or want ads. If not, please follow this chronicle of the war on our future, the war on our young.


Planned Parenthood is all over the news, so you undoubtedly know what has been going on lately. A group has filmed executives of that organization apparently negotiating to sell “fetal tissue”. Selling this tissue is illegal.

If you had the stomach to watch any of the videos you may agree with me when I say the films were horrifying. These people are monsters. I can’t even fathom the inhumanity these people wallow in every day.

As a result of the apparent transgression of Planned Parenthood lots of people are up in arms. Certain Congressmen and women are investigating the outfit, and others are trying to take away their federal money.

The Department of Justice is investigating the people that made the films to determine if they can be prosecuted for revealing an inconvenient truth. I’m not surprised that they are pushing against the truth to save a political agenda I don’t want to understand.

I’ve found that Planned Parenthood does deal in abortions. They say that they don’t sell tissue; they just recover their costs for processing, and perhaps shipping and handling. Their press releases say that abortion is only a small part of their business, which is about 3%. It doesn’t sound as severe if you phrase it that way, but if you think about it, it’s still severe. If I’m the model citizen 97% of the time but rob banks 3% of the time, I still belong in jail. If I’m the perfect husband except for 3% of the time I will still have a lot to answer for and home will be a chilly place indeed. Saying Planned Parenthood is involved in abortion only 3% of the time is like saying the Nazis only spent 3% of their time exterminating Jews. It’s not a valid argument.

The best thing about this is it brings the abortion debate back to the forefront. Legal abortions have been available in this country since 1973, and in that time we’ve killed about 56 millions babies. Fifty six million lives are too many for me to fully understand. That’s twice the population of Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri combined.

We don’t talk about these abortions as lost lives. We manipulate the language to make abortion prettier. We call it “women’s health”.
Instead of talking about killing babies we talk about terminating pregnancies and dealing with fetal tissue. This technique is the same one we use to justify killing adults. To be able to kill, we have to dehumanize the enemy. During the early settlement of this continent, Puritan leaders rationalized that Indians were children of the devil, so they could be killed without remorse. Like genocide, we separate ourselves from the subject of the termination to soften the implications of what we’ve done.

You’ll know that this is true if you notice the news reports when a pregnant woman is murdered. The criminal is accused of murdering the woman and her unborn child. It’s never reported that he eliminated fetal tissue. Humanizing the unborn baby serves the purpose of those involved just like dehumanizing serves other interests.

I believe we’re hard-wired to have strong affection for and a strong need to protect infants. It makes sense that to survive as a species we have to love our young. This makes the fetal tissue language necessary.

Almost anyone that can see a life form that closely resembles a baby can’t bear to see it harmed. If I were wrong on this point then deceased infants would appear on weekly TV crime shows along with the gory remains of adults. That is not done because it’s too horrible to see. That is, unless you are without normal human feelings.

I could go on and on about abortion being a war on minorities or that we are aborting our own futures with every procedure that stops a beating heart. Perhaps that is a discussion for another time. For now, I’m just glad that so many are talking about this. I hope we stop this war on babies. They are not our enemy.

Road Trip

We just completed another memorable family adventure. It was every bit as harrowing as bungee jumping into a burning vat of ravenous rattlesnakes. We took a trip to Chicago.

A normal family would fly to Chicago or take a train or drive any of the hundreds of modern expressways. A normal family might forego Chicago and go to anywhere else on the planet. We are not that normal family.

After extensive research consisting of watching “Chicago Fire” and a musical named after the city, I decided we’d save 3 or 4 dollars staying in the camper in Indiana and driving to the city. We’d get the city experience and wind down in the pastoral countryside. That sounds almost sane, doesn’t it? Wait, there’s more.

To make this a perfectly memorable trip, why not forget the Interstate and drive up old US 41? We did just that. I know now why they made interstates.

It takes a while just to get to Highway 41, as we all know. In the southern part of Indiana, it’s a good 4-lane on which you can make pretty good time if you make it through all of the 8,000 traffic lights some sadist installed. After Terre Haute there aren’t any more stop lights for a long time because the road turns into a 2 lane winding goat trail laid out by a drunk. Dragging a 6,000 pound trailer around tree infested hairpin turns makes this an especially remarkable experience.

Eventually the 4-lane unrolls again and you’re off to the next red light, and the next, and on and on.
Our destination of Cedar Lake scrolled past before we knew it. I had the pleasure of turning into a dead end alley and backing a trailer between a light pole and a covey of gang-bangers so we could turn around. After some swearing and screeching brakes we got on the right track until we got lost again.

Our RV Park claimed to be on 137th Avenue, which didn’t really exist. I later learned the address was implied and everyone else knew exactly how to translate the address to English.

While I’m thinking about it, no self respecting town needs 137 streets. Ten numbered streets are quite enough. If you exceed 10 streets, you need to make it another town. I can say Bob lives in the same town as Bill, but if they live 15 miles apart that’s not really true. They live in different places. If your town is that big, and you say “I’m going to the store in town” and you disappear, nobody will know which store you went to. Keep towns small. It’s safer.

So after 5 phone calls and 3 threats by other drivers, we found our designated RV spot. It was nice, so it was worth the effort getting there.
Not having learned anything the previous day, we continued up Highway 41 to Chicago the next morning. Without the trailer, how hard could it be?
Being an old road, 41 takes a lot of turns but is well marked every once in a while. Somewhere on the South side, a sign is missing. I didn’t know that at first but I figured it out.

I learned a sign was missing and I’d missed a turn after about an hour on 87th Street. To the uninitiated, that is a bad South-side street. The neighborhood got exponentially worse as we drove. I wasn’t sure where I was at. I could have gotten my bearings from the sun but it was hiding due to the bad neighborhood. My wife turned on the GPS but it just kept saying “You’re an idiot”. The thousands of people on the street looked angrier and more dangerous the more I drove. I think some of them were zombies hungry for my meager brains.

We finally asked directions which directed us to drive in circles for a while. After seeing the same gang graffiti on a wall over the same wino 14 times we turned against directions and eventually found a major road. The GPS said, “That was luck” and then directed us to downtown where we got lost in a much better neighborhood.

We decided to go to the Navy Pier because we couldn’t find any of the other attractions. We found a parking garage too small for a truck but paid $43 to park there anyway.

The rest of the adventure wasn’t nearly as exciting or dangerous. We learned to be as rude as the natives and managed finding the truck at the end of the day. The sun frequented the area of the city we were in, so we found our way back to the RV on the mystery avenue. It ended up being a good trip.

The next time, I think we’ll try Route 66. Want to come along?